LAW & CRIME

The White Mile Trial: A River Rafting Tragedy and the Courtroom Justice That Followed

Rowman & Littlefield. Mar. 2025. 168p. ISBN 9798881802011. $30. CRIME
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Attorney and whitewater rafting guide Kuhne (KGB Man: The Cold War’s Most Notorious Soviet Agent and the First To Be Exchanged at the Bridge of Spies) has penned a book about an annual corporate retreat that turned deadly. In 1987, 11 business executives from some of the biggest advertising companies in the U.S. went on what was billed as a whitewater-rafting bonding adventure on the Chilko River in British Columbia. Their guide, Ron Thompson, had 13 years of experience leading countless similar excursions, but on this day, churning rapids and crushing boulders splintered the raft and threw all but one passenger into the water. Five people ultimately died, and the survivors’ ordeal became the centerpiece of a gripping courtroom drama after the spouse of one of the decedents sued the agency that sponsored the business-building trip.
VERDICT Kuhne describes the harrowing experience of the rafters in painstaking detail, using the trial transcripts as a primary source. This book grippingly exposes the disastrous events that played out on the rafting trip, while delivering a sobering mediation on accountability and survival and raising haunting questions.
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