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.
