Oregon Paddling Trip Part 1:Breitenbush

With flows across the PNW on the rise, Chipper and Leif wanted to head down to Oregon before the classic Washington runs started to come in. We had our eyes on two gems: the Breitenbush River, and Opal Creek (section of the Little North Fork of the Santiam). I'd run the Breitenbush in my first year of boating, and had definitely been in over my head at the time (but I didn't swim!). Since the weekend coincided with Mother's Day, I drove separately in order to go visit my folks, while Chip, Kelsey, and Leif drove down together. I left Seattle at around 7 and, with a quick stop at Burgerville for a strawberry shake, arrived in Detroit, OR around 11:30. Met up with the others, and we camped up the Bbush river road, falling asleep quickly with the sound of the river all around.

We woke up to a beefy 1300cfs in the Bbush. Rackley's Oregon Kayaking TR says 1300 is an optimal medium flow, but IMO that is pushing medium high. We scouted our way up the river, noting some sketchy wood in places, and finally put on at the campground. First drop of the day, the Slot. Pushy class III into a 5 foot ledge, into a twisty pillowy flume. Excellent rapid, except Chip missed the boof and got worked in the ledge.

Chip, battling the ledge at the Slot

He swam after a valiant fight and his boat immediately took off down the river, with me chasing it. I couldn't get it to shore, and finally eddied out above a blind-ish turn. Leif came down after a while and we proceeded to work our way downriver, with the intention of recovering Chip's Nomad. I was pretty uncomfortable - there was a lot of wood, the river was quite pushy, and we had to scout a lot, and portage a couple times. We finally got down to the one mandatory portage, a riverwide log in some class I. After a tough scramble up to the road, Leif's boat decided to escape and took off down the slope and into the river without him! Leif took down the bank after it, while I was thinking "well, I'm not soloing class IV with wood to recover two boats, sorry guys!". Amazingly, Leif then comes back up to the road - his boat had eddied out upright after running S-turn rapid, and he'd just jumped in and grabbed it! We headed back downstream and ended up finding Chipper's Nomad maybe 5 miles downstream of his swim, beached on a gravel bar in the middle of the river. We got it to shore, hiked it up a trail, and then boated down to the takeout. I was beat - not enough food or water, but a fun enough day on the river, and a pretty good adventure, with no lost gear!

Snowshoe-assisted hiking

I needed to get out of town today. With colder temps everywhere and only the Sky running, I decided I wanted to get in a hike, and hopefully break in my new MSR snowshoes. The Olympic Peninsula had sunny skies forecasted, and I woke up early to catch the 7:10 Kingston ferry. I was at the "trailhead" for one of the OP snowshoe hikes in my book by 9:15. The hike itself was just up a gated road in the National Park, but it was very beautiful. Due to little snow accumulation over the last couple weeks there was a thick layer of ice, with maybe a quarter inch of powder from last night's snowfall on top. I ended up hiking most of the road, only putting on my snowshoes near the top. I hiked hard, mostly because it was REALLY grey and cold, but also because my book had mentioned a second gate as a landmark at 2.8 miles in. Since I never found that second gate I was pretty confused and thought I'd been hiking a long time for less than 2.8miles! I finally wound up at the Deer Park campground at 7.4 miles in at around 1pm. It was so cold I only hung out long enough to eat a snack and drink some ginger tea before heading back down. On the way down the sun burst through and blue sky opened up vistas of the Strait of Juan de Fuca all the way to the Cascades. Glorious. One highlight was all of the animal tracks in the fresh now - I hiked all the way back to the car following a new set of fox tracks that hadn't been there on my way up.


Hurricane Ridge across Wolf Creek valley in the afternoon light

Nice hoarfrost

Cliched but irresistable new gear shot. Not sure how cold it was up here, but I had icicles coming off my beard where my breath had condensed and frozen.

Pretty cool hike, definitely would come back if the snow was fresh and deep. Almost 15 miles was a bit brutal, but getting to Deer Park was worth it.

Whitewater road trip part II

After crashing at my parents house in Amity, Chipper and I headed north to try to find something to run.  We were having serious technical cell phone problems, and ended up not really getting in touch with anyone.  We ended up heading to the East Fork Lewis river, in hopes of just randomly meeting up with folks.  Chipper had been in touch with Mike Olsen, who lived on the river, and who apparently was spending the day clearing a log jam in the tightest part of the gorge.  After being generally unsucessful for about two hours, we finally ran into Heather Herbeck and friends  on their way to the putin.  We tagged along and ended up having a fantastic run. 

The EF was running at about 1000cfs but it felt like low water compared to the upper wind the day before.  We ran half a mile of II+ until we got to Sunset falls, one of my favorite waterfalls.  Although there are three sweet lines on this drop, only the left looked good.  I ran second after Heather, cutting diagonally left through the guard hole and getting a good left boof to straighten out.  There were some interesting lines, including a swim in which the boat completely vanished under the falls for a good minute.  

We ran on down through sky pilot, but at the Olsen's house there was a big sign warning that the logs hadn't been cut out yet, and to come on up to the house.  Mrs Olsen was kind enough to drive us in a truck shuttle around the gorge to their friend's house on the other side of the gorge. We put back in a ran down to Horseshoe Falls, which most of us ran blind through door #2.  Easy falls, but so much fun!  The rest of the run was relaxing and fun.  Ended up being a really fun group.

After the mandatory PDXkayaker PBRs at the takeout, chip and I drove back to Seattle, getting in around 8 after a great weekend of boating.

Whitewater road trip part I

Chipper and I had been talking about a road trip for a while and events lined up this weekend. A lot of talk had been bouncing around the NW messageboards about the Upper Wind being at a great rafting level this weekend, and we decided to head down and meet up with some Portland paddlers to run it. Randomly, I got in touch with an old paddling buddy - Crazy Ray, from Portland, who I took a creeking progression with in my first year of boating while at Lewis & Clark.

We met up in Carson at the takeout, although more honestly we met at the start of the takeout road, since none of our vehicles could make it down the road, with at least 2 feet of snow on the ground. Ray suggested we start by running Lower Trout Creek into the Upper Wind, and we all thought that was a great idea (the one other time I'd done this run, we ran Lower Trout into the UW). I would characterize Lower Trout as a class III+ to IV micro creek, that gets progressively steeper the closer to the Wind you get. We spaced out well on the creek (although we got in the way of some pro Hood River paddlers as they sped through) and had a pretty uneventful and fun run down to the wind. Trout felt east coast manky, which was fun for me and not so fun for some of the others.

The Wind felt huge when we got to the confluence. We later found out that it was probably medium to medium high according to Jason Rackley's Oregonkayaking.net site. We headed straight into Initiation, which was a long rapid with a sweet boof at the top and tons of hole dodging and wave bashing throughout. I'd remembered the run mellowing out for a while, but instead we got continuous pushy big water rapids all the way to Ram's Horn. I remember screaming into the eddy above Ram's Horn with a big "WHOOP!" and everyone in the eddy whooping back at me. Good times!!!!! Ram's Horn was big - a slidey entrance to a big curler that wanted to drop you into a big hole. I ran it fine, getting left of the hole. Chipper said that after he dropped straight into the meat of the hole he got hammered so hard he hit his shoulder on the bottom of the river. Yikes!

The closest I came to getting worked was at Balls to the Wall Right, a long rapid ending into two backed up ledge holes against the right wall. I thought I'd be fine by powering right to left through the holes but at the first hole I got stopped by a boil about a foot and a half high and ended up stuck hard in a side surf between the hole, the boil, and a big upstream rock. It was ugly for a while, and everyone thought I would end up swimming out, but I finally managed to claw my way out along the rock and made it down to the eddy. WHEW! The next guy went right of where I did and got hammered against the wall and pushed up against an undercut and swam. BTTWR was definitely the site of the most carnage on the run.

We ran a right side line at Climax, which had a huge hole at that level.

The rest of the run was a blast - big water and fantastic scenery (including a massive cascade falling into the river from the cliffs above).

Getting to the takeout, I was bonking from being hungry, but we still had the hike out through the snow....Which was all fine once we made it to the awesome WalkingMan Brewery in Stevenson, for pizza and brews.

Upper and Middle Pilchuck Creek III-IV+

Chipper called me this morning - "Pilchuck is running, we're going to run it". Well...I hadn't be in my boat for three weeks, when I was back in DC and ran the Potomac. Before then, it had been about 6 weeks since I ran the Foss. So, I wasn't exactly on my game. But, whatever, I had to live up to my new years resolution of getting out more! And Pilchuck was notorious for being hard to catch, needing a ton of rain to bring up. The region's rivers were just recovering from the devastating high water the week before and we were hoping the wood situation (7+ mandatory portages reported from the last folks to run it) had cleared up some.

We geared up at the takeout and headed upstream, hitting 2-3 feet of snow pretty quickly. The parking situation at the putin was interesting - 2-5 feet of plowed snow from the road prevented us from finding an easy way to the river, and we ended up sliding down the snow sketchily to the river bank.

Once on the water, I realized this run was absolutely perfect run for tuning up my rusty skills. Totally continuous class III with interspersed class IV sections, waves, ledges, holes, boulder gardens. It was all there, and I was feeling good in minutes. There was a ton of wood that was kind of in play everywhere but nothing that needed to be portaged. The upper went by quickly, with only two really memorable bits. One rapid was split by a island with the main flow going straight into a big logjam piled on the upstream side of the island. I eddied out on the wrong side of the river, and had to pull off a sketchy upstream ferry with my back to the wood. The other notable rapid was a long class III-III+ rapid that ended in a big diagonal ledge that sent me out in a huge stern ender. Good times!

The scenery turned incredible once we headed into the Middle Pilchuck section. Deep mossy basalt gorge that the Bennett book says is reminiscent of the Olympic peninsula. The best drop on the run came up quickly - a 15' waterfall with several lines. The scout eddy was small and there was a lot of us so I ended up just hanging out in my boat, receiving some verbal beta, and dropping it blind.

Photo by Jeff Dwyer

Good times!!! It was a little off vert and I penciled a bit but recovered fine. Everyone had great lines. The rest of the run was bigwater III+ to IV with no portages. Beautiful waterfalls cascaded here and there into the canyon, and I saw a huge bald eagle in a tree high above the river. We got to the takeout and all of us couldn't stop talking about how awesome this run is. Utterly fantastic day on the water. This run would be a classic if it ran more, and didn't collect as much wood, but we were extremely lucky to have a portage-free descent.

Starting off the new year right

A priority for me this year is to get out of Seattle and explore more - basically be more of a bad ass. The first quarter of school was a little rough, as I had trouble balancing fun and work, and I missed out on a lot of opportunities to kayak and hike.

So, with the first weekend of the year upon me, and waking up to a typical rainy, cold, and grey Seattle day, I decided to get out of town! Following the advice of a recent trip report on the awesome Washington hiking site www.wta.org, I headed north on the 5 to Mt Vernon and the Chuckanut Mountains. These mountains are immediately adjacent to the Sound and are apparently utterly spectacular when the weather is nice. I parked at the trailhead for the Oyster Dome, and set off in all my rain gear up the steep hike in the pouring rain. Being by myself turned out to be rather exciting, as I immediately started thinking about mountain lions in the thick forest. I hit snow on the trail after a couple miles and a couple thousand feet of gain, and soon the pouring rain turned into thick falling snow. It was easy to make out the trail though, and the snowy forest scenery was spectacular. Since I didn't bring my snowshoes, my pace slowed and I eventually decided to turn around about 2 o clock, since I didn't want to risk losing daylight by myself. This hike was fantastic, and I didn't even get a chance to see what is supposed to make it so great - the view from the top of Oyster Dome looking out across the Puget Sound! I'll be back.

Foss River IV-IV+

After running the Sky at various levels almost every weekend for two months, I was itching to run something new and harder than Boulder drop. Earlier in the week all of western Washington (and Oregon for that matter) got pounded by up to 8 inches of rain in two days. Most of the larger rivers shot up to near flood stage or over, and a lot of the farms and housing developments built in flood plains had some major flooding issues. The Snoqualmie drainage in particular got hit hard. Here's some footage of 268ft Snoqualmie Falls at ~50,000cfs with logs and telephone poles going over the drop. http://www.kirotv.com/video/17965574/index.html

By the weekend though, levels had dropped such that most tributaries of the bigger rivers were at perfect flows. Chipper and I decided to run the Foss River, a tributary of the South Fork Skykomish. We met up Saturday morning with Jeff Dwyer and Leif Kerchoff and headed up the Sky drainage.

The Foss is roadside, but a ways down from the road for most of the run. The putin involved a scramble through some fallen logs and ferns to a gravel bar in the middle of the river. Flows seemed medium to beefy to me (but I think I am used to east coast style boating at this point). We put in and immediately were making continuous class four moves in relatively pushy water. Things went well for about 3/4 of a mile until we grabbed a little eddy on river right to scout the biggest rapid of the day, Ken and Barbie. I was pretty much set on portaging before I saw the rapid, but wrenching my lower back lifting my boat up a ledge clinched it for me.

Ken and Barbie turned out to look big-ish but very doable, and I will definitely be back to run this one day. The move on the right was basically to come down through some pushy water and brace off a pillow into a seam. The real difficulty in the drop came at the end when only a short moving pool separated the rapid from some downstream class 4 ledges. I set up safety with a rope on a huge boulder just down from the drop, while *forgot his name* set up to be boat safety.

Leif and Jeff came down, and greased the rapid. I shot these pics of them with Jeff's camera.

Leif running Ken and Barbie
Jeff

Next guy down was Oliver, who took the more difficult left line, and immediately proceeded to flip off of a mid-stream pillow, flush through the rapid upside down, miss a roll in the pool, and swim into the downstream ledges. Leif, Jeff, and *FHN* took off downstream and were quickly out of sight. Chipper was left in the eddy above Ken and Barbie, and with no boat support downstream I motioned for him to portage. He did, and we ended up deciding to hike out to the road at that point since our group was split up and we didn't want to potentially add to whatever rescue was going on downstream with Oliver.

We were picked up by another boater and I decided to head downstream to a bridge in hopes of waiting for the group and boating with them to the takeout. I ended up waiting for about 45 min and eventually decided to join up with another group who told me that my crew was still in the middle of an Z-drag extraction upstream. We boated a mile or two of pretty classic III+ continuous waves to the takeout, where Oliver and Chipper were waiting. Oliver had hiked out, and didn't know what was going on with his boat or the others. We drove upstream and randomly found Jeff et al., who had lugged Oliver's boat and paddle up the steepest part of the canyon to the road. They ended up running the rest of the run, and we all met up at the takeout for shit-talking and debriefing.

All in all, a pretty solid little adventure, albeit unexpected. I boated at most 2 miles of the Foss, although I saw enough to know that I will definitely be coming back. Super fun run and it seemed like a great training ground for harder stuff.