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.

Huckleberry Hike

I met up with my parents for a weekend on one of their favorite hikes - Goat Mountain near Mt. St. Helens. Beautiful place, with mountain vistas everywhere - but truly amazing amounts of huckleberries! Mom and Dad hike here every fall, bringing every Nalgene they own and returning with liters of berries.

I'll let the pictures do the talking, but there was one unusual event that took place before we went to bed. We camped on the ridge just off the trail, and were just making dinner in the failing light when a big orange-clad bear hunter with a bear gun showed up, lost! He had come up to hunt bear with friends (great), had headed out by himself from their camp, and gotten disoriented and lost. Apparently he'd been lost for ages wandering back and forth on the ridge, no food, no water. We hooked him up and gave him directions as best we could. Nice enough guy, but jeez get a clue....

Old dead trees in the Mt. St. Helens blast zone

The moon was incredible this evening

Yes, that is a half liter of Knob Creek.

Nice picture of Mom and Dad with the moon and Mt. Adams in the background!

Alpenglow on Mt. Rainier

The ridge we were on was insane. Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier just in your face, and Mt. Hood off in the distance.

No pictures of the berries, but I think we brought out nine liters!

First run on the Skykomish River! 9/28/08

Absolutely gorgeous bluebird KAVU day, and far past time to get on the water up here in Washington. I'd be busy with school, and moving, and getting situated and hadn't been in my boat in 6 weeks (6 weeks!!!). Water levels were low, but the Sky (an hour outside of Seattle, class III-IV+) was in. I just headed out there in hopes of meeting up with people. And I did! Met two super cool guys at the put in, boated with them, and ended up padding in a group of maybe 20 paddlers, including James who started ProfessorPaddle, and Christian Knight, a pro boater with ACA. Let me just say that this kind of scenario would probably never have occured in the mid atlantic, at least not without me reciting my "paddling resume" and dropping names. It was totally chill and friendly people were just out to have a good time.

Anyway, the river. Awesome! UN BE LIEV A BLE scenery. Put in under Mt Index, with jagged views of the Cascades around every turn in the river. Turquoise crystal clear water with 2 foot salmon swimming upstream to spawn! Grey granite boulders in the riverbed, honestly this place was a hybrid between the northwest and Cali. Stunning. Great whitewater too - I felt like it was the Lower Yough, but with an upper yough drop (Boulder Drop) in the middle. Boulder Drop felt like Bastard lite, or something. Good clean fun. I felt a little out of sorts due to the time out of my boat, but just stoked to be paddling.

South Sister Summit 8/28/08

Mom and I spontaneously decided to turn a mellow weekend backpack into a big adventure. Our goal was to backpack to Moiraine Lake, at the foot of South Sister (the 3rd highest mountain in Oregon, at 10,358ft), wake up the next morning, summit the mountain, and hike out. We woke up in Amity to cold, drippy skies, but by the time we'd crossed the cascades and rolled into Bend the rain shadow effect produced KAVU skies and temps in the 80's. The backpack up to Moiraine Lake proved to be beautiful, through oldgrowth ponderosa pine forests.

We found an incredible campsite on a ridge overlooking the lake, with great views of South Sister and Broken Top. The lake itself had an incredible turquoise hue. Probably one of the prettiest campsites I've ever camped at.





We intimidated ourselves by looking at the trail zigzagging its way up the face of South Sister, seemingly too steep to climb, although we knew that hundreds of people a day throughout the summer make it to the top. If you look close at the next picture, you can see the faint trail up to the summit.
We got up early the next day, ate some breakfast, and headed out. I was being very careful with my knee, having hurt it in Colorado several weeks before. We made great time up the steep trail. It started getting really steep and scrambly, and we were glad that we'd gotten off to such an early start.

Looking back at Mt. Bachelor and all of the beautiful cascade lakes.

Mom, with the toughest part of the hike still to come! Feeling good though!
The last .5 mile of the hike was pretty brutal, and slightly vertigo-inducing. We slogged through STEEP pumice fields, using our poles heavily to prevent sliding back down. The sun was hot at this point, and I think we were both starting to get a little dehydrated. Every now and then people would pass us coming down, saying how gorgeous it was at the top! That is what kept us going.

Finally we're there!!!
The gorgeous little lake in the glacier at the summit. We were surprised to see a glacier at the top, and sketched out by the sound of rushing water underneath it!! And even more sketched out by the numbskulls who were walking across the glacier!
Mom and I at the north side of the summit, with middle and north sister in the background.

Sketchy climb down from the north rim.
Bounding through ankle deep pumice on our way down. It was like skiing through powder, except it wasn't quite as soft.


One last view of a beautiful mountain.The look says it all. NOTHING like a cold Pelican IPA waiting in the car after a long hard hot hike.

All in all, an absolutely INCREDIBLE hike. I want to do it once a year. It seems that people tend to do this hike in a single day, but I would think that for all the pain, you miss out on one of the more incredible lakeside campsites I've ever seen. From the camp, we hiked 4 miles with 4000ft elevation gain to the summit, 4 miles back to our packs, and 2 miles out to the car. LOONG day, but so worth it!!!

Colorado, July 30-August 10

Sarah and I met up in Colorado this summer to see each other, have some adventures in the Rockies, and go to the wedding of our close friends, Justin and Lissa Pressfield. Here are some pictures of the trip!

Incredible clouds at Maroon Bells State Park.

Pretty flowers, pretty aspens, and pretty lady!
Cathedral Lake from 13,000ft Electric Pass. Pretty sure I hurt my knee on the climb down, as it flared up bad on our backpack to Willow Lake the next day (no pics from that since I forgot the camera! have to go back)
Sarah spots a marmot!

I like aspen trees.

Sarah does too!




After our overnight hike to Willow Lake (which was absolutely stunning, despite the mosquitos and my bum knee), we headed east, stopping at the Grottos of the Roaring Fork.



Cute picture of us!