It seems like just yesterday that summer was over and the trees were beginning to turn gold. I was looking forward to cool evening, long runs and steelhead fishing. I guess I blinked, and now the tamarack have dropped their needles in a tawny coating over the snow.
Click here for a small gallery of images. More to come soon as the snow continue to fall and the ponds freeze over.
Part of an upcoming collection: more here, or click the image.
The Lakes Basin: A good long hoof from the Two Pan trailhead.
Wallowa Lake looking East.
I guess the change of seasons brings a change of lifestyle. Graduation is done, school is complete, it’s still snowing, and the hills below my new home are turning green. I’ve recently taken a job as the Program Coordinator for Fishtrap, a literary non-profit based in Enterprise, Oregon. I’m living in a passive-solar home on the flanks of Mt. Joseph, and the view envelops the moraines of Wallowa Lake, the Zumwalt Prarie, and beyond that, Idaho’s Seven Devil Mountains. Pretty tough life!Due to all this transition, my camera has spent more time than I would like stuffed in a pelican box in the closet, and not nearly enough time out and about taking pictures. Sophie and I got out for a wonderful row on the Lower Columbia, and I’ve had the time to do a few walks from this new home. Perhaps as I become more settled I’ll have slightly more time to take pictures, rather than the haphazard lens toting that I’ve been prone to these last month. Click HERE to enjoy, and there will be more to come.
Leaving Marble Canyon, about to enter Grand Canyon.
Despite months with very little access to internet, I have finally sorted through my pictures from our June trip down the Colorado, and you can now find pictures HERE. Look for another update soon.
The Umatilla is the backyard run for much of SE Washington and NE Oregon. It flows right through downtown Pendleton, past the rodeo grounds, and offers a great early morning or after-work run with a bit of surfing, a bit of floating, and some waving to the people on the bridges. The river is generally runnable down to 600 CFS and is fun up to about 2,000 CFS, but we did find it runnable with a huge bouncy wave / hole at the takeout at a it over 8,000 CFS.Pictures can be found HERE.
This last week the run came up to just over 1,000 CFS on the Oregon Levels gauge (http://www.wkcc.org/levels/?P=Oregon.html), so we headed out for a quick friday morning run. To reach the put-in, take 17th St. (by the hospital), from Court Ave (the main st.). Go north to at T intersection. Take a right at the T, pass the baseball fields, and you’ll find a dead-end with parking right by a paved walking trail. If you walk upstream to the end of the paved trail, you’ll find a nice spot to access the river. The put-in has some wood near it, so be careful, probably not the best spot to practice eddy-turns. There is a major hazard of wood throughout the entire run, so be very careful, especially around the bridges. As you head downstream you’ll find lots of nice waves. Right after the first bridge there will be a trailer park on the right bank, and some of the best waves are in this section. Just downstream is a broken down weir. Run on the left (don’t try to run over the weir, it’s got rebar in it). You can eddy out safely behind the weir and play on a great wave that is just off the end of the weir where it has fallen down. The next stretch has a lot of fun waves and eddies, and the river is flowing adjacent to downtown. The biggest rapids are just below downtown. You’ll be able to see the roofs of the rodeo-stadium and there is a gauging station of the left in the biggest rapid. Run down the middle and punch some holes. Not a great place to play as there is lots of rip-rap in the river (a grocery cart spend most of last winter in this rapid). Continue downstream to the take-out which is a park on river left under two really big overpasses.To reach the takeout from the put-in continue down Court Ave through downtown, until it takes a gradual right onto Westgate. Just before the road heads up onto a bridge, take a right into the Sears parking lot. If you stay to the left, you’ll end up at a dead-end with a city park and bathroom with river-access. Another option is to use the paved trail that runs the length of the run to either walk, run, or bike the shuttle.
This is a fun, and quite short run (just under 3 miles). Watch for wood and crap that people have thrown in the river, and have fun on all the fast little waves!
I know school is supposed to be all about studying in the library until the wee hours of the morning, but there’s got to be some flexibility in that. I found some of that flexibility mid-week, as the Palouse, a river that rarely has any water, rose to about 800 cfs. Most years there are a couple of weeks when the Palouse runs above 1,500 cfs, but with the pathetic snow-year and early irrigators, this looked like it might be our only chance to head out. Luckily for me, my wednesday afternoon class was canceled (for non-related reasons), and with the cars loaded up, we headed off just after lunch. Here are some picture, and continue reading for a full description of the wonderful whitewater-fest that followed.
There are a few issues with this run, such as the fact that it is dead center in the middle of nowhere, and the shuttle alone takes over an hour. But to make up for that, it’s got 3 fun waterfalls (not counting the really big one at the takeout). We finally got on the water, to see that the irrigators were already pumping the meager amount of water that was flowing down the channel. After about a mile of flatwater, from the put-in at the bridge in Hooper, we came to an area where the river channeled out and there was a dilapidated farmhouse on the left bank surrounded by dead poplar trees. There are two channels on the first falls. The left channel seems really shallow, so we’ve always stuck to the far river right bank. This time, however, the water was low enough that the furthest right chute was too shallow. We opted instead for the furthest left chute, still in the right channel. It’s easily scouted from the island in the middle of the river, and after a few folks went pretty deep, we decided that hitting the bottom isn’t too much of a concern, although penciling in is still a bit sketchy.
After the first falls its a bit over a mile to the slide. At this water level (the gauge was broken, so somewhere around 600), there was a semi-runnable spot right in the middle, but it looked pretty shallow so none of us opted to run it. There’s an easy portage line down the left bank. If you decide to portage on the right, bring a long throwrope or be ready to huck your boat off of a cliff.
A few more miles of flatwater through a beautiful canyon, under a bridge, and past a ranch, and you get to the last rapid. You’ll be able to hear it, and there is grafitti on the some rocks on the right when you want to take out and scout. This one is easy to walk, as the takeout is right there, but it’s runnable at higher water. Just be careful of the 185′ waterfall about 1/4 mile downstream. The hike out goes from the last rapid through a level area, up an enormous embankment to the railroad tracks, left along the tracks for about 100 yards, then up a trail to the left to a road that leads to the parking lot.
This is a great run for someone who is stuck in Eastern Washington without much else to do. 800 cfs is definitely on the low side, I think it would be most fun over 1500. To get there, drive E from Walla Walla on highway 12 to the left turn for “Starbuck”. Take this road NE, cross the Snake River at Lyons Ferry, go up the hill, and turn right into Palouse Falls State Park, the takeout. To reach the put-in, take a right out of Palouse Falls State Park, drive until you go through a town. At the end of the town is a big intersection. Take a right and drive for about 5 miles. There will be a right turn for “Hooper”. Take this turn, cross the bridge over the river, turn right on a dirt road immediately after the bridge, and voila, your at the put-in.
No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, last week I did come pretty close though. Perched down in the bottom right hand corner of Oregon is a small river that flows out of Nevada, through Oregon, and into the Snake in Idaho, the Owyhee. The closest major town to the river is Burns, over 100 miles away, the feeling or remoteness is unrivaled by any other river I’ve been on in the US. The river was named for two Hawaiians who were part of Peter Skene Ogden’s expedition to explore the region. The story varies, but most agree on the fact that the duo either ran away or were killed by local Indians. Apparantly Hawaii was at the time nicknamed “Owyhee”, and the river got its name. After many hours of driving we finally made it the river in the midst of one of the strangest windstorms; the entire landscape was visually on the move as thousands of tumbleweeds bounced and rolled over the heavily grazed hillsides. Four days of floating and two days of sun later and we found ourselves at the takeout; the Birch Creek Ranch, with a road that somehow carved its way up a near vertical ravine, to the top of a plateau about 30 miles from the nearest pavement. More hours of driving, and back I went to school, ready to drop back off of the face of the earth. More of an update will come soon, along with a river description on the American Whitewater site, but in the meantime, here are some pictures! Enjoy,
-Ben
Another local run down! Photos can be found HERE.
Dave, Mike, Josh and I headed over to the East Fork of the Lewis River this morning for a quick run. We shot some photos at Sunset Falls, Screaming Left, and Horseshoe Falls, check them out. More of an update coming soon (along with more pictures).
As usual, you can get straight to the photos HERE.
These photos from a day spent exploring the Sandy River Gorge are the beginnings of a project for American Whitewater. The plan is to paddle as many of the local Portland runs and take photographs with the intention of creating an online river guide similar to what Tom O’Keefe has created for Washington. The first step in this grand plan of photographically scintillating exploration came yesterday when Dave Hoffman, Mike Northrop, Tom DeCuir and I headed out to the Sandy River Gorge.
The hardest part of the entire day was probably getting Dave out of the coffee shop with the cute barista- once beyond that obstacle we only had to find the take-out, put-in, and paddle the river in between, comparatively easy.
To find the put in take Hwy 26 west through Sandy. At the last traffic light in Sandy take a left down OR 211 (?) towards Bull Run. The take-out is at Revenue Bridge, however due to landowner issues it is best to park about 100 yds before the bridge on a road that turns off to the left. After a lovely discussion (mostly about the aforementioned barista), the 4 of us crammed into the cab of Mike’s pickup truck and headed off upstream.
Our original plan was to put-in above Alder Creek, however after 20 minutes of drysuit stench in the cab of the truck and no-sign of a good put-in, with the guidebook locked in my car at the takeout, we decided to settle for the put-in at the Marmot Dam site. From Revenue Bridge continue on OR 211. The first right is Marmot Rd., take that until a dirt road takes off on the right with lots of big official signs. The road winds down to a locked gate. At this point we decided that the easiest way to the river was down. After some sliding on a muddy slope, the kind of place where it is far to easy to imagine serial killers dumping bodies off of the dirt bank. We just about dumped Dave, and his boat, off the bank, however a sort of sketchy belay later, and Dave had made it to the river. The other 3 of us decided that we did not in fact want to die by falling off of a dirt cliff on the Sandy River, so we made our way back up the road and continued walking down to just below the dam site where we found an easy put-in.
The first couple miles of the river are easy class II with one woody class III that is worth scouting on the right, you can see giant logs sticking out of the river from upstream. Continuing downstream you head into a fun little gorge section with a few class III rapids and some lovely overhanging caves. We made it past Sasquatch and his cohorts and had fun through Boulder, the first class IV of the run. At the level we ran it at, the line was just to the left of the biggest boulder, winding down through some other rocks. Next was Rasp Rock where there’s a big hole that you might want to paddle hard into. Half the group went right, the other half went left, and we all survived so that just goes to show (?) We continued down to Drain Hole, a tight right turn with a big sieve on the left, a move that looks hard but actually has a huge pillow on the sieve. The final rapid is Revenue Bridge, a fun, but quite rocky rapid that is much bigger than it looks from the bridge. We ran far right down the top section, then left at the bottom, skirting (or getting chundered in) some quite large holes. The takeout is on the left at the bridge.
Hopefully there will be some more posts in the coming weeks of other runs in the area that we’re trying to get images and writing from for AW. In the meantime, enjoy the snow, doughnuts, baristas, school, finals, and most of all, paddling.
SYOTR,
-Boots
Just back from 4 days freezing my butt off on the lower Salmon river between Pine Bar and Heller Bar on the Snake. Images, as usual, can be found HERE. Sorry there aren’t more, I spent most of my time trying to keep people from dying of hypothermia.
We began the trip on Saturday morning with some rental vehicle confusion. We had some confusion also in filling our water seeing as all of the taps in Grangville seemed to have frozen solid the night before. Eventually a nice woman at a gas station helped up fill our water jugs and we roared down to the put-in at Pine Bar. On the water by 4 and to Packer’s Creek by 6 or so. The evening quickly plummeted to somewhere around 10 degrees, one fisherman went as far as to claim a low of 5 degrees Saturday evening. We stayed warm though with two delicious quiches (salmon, bacon and spinach!) The morning came along with one 7 gallon water jerry frozen solid, luckily the ones in the raft only froze on the top so we could break one open to get some coffee water going. We finally got on the water mid-morning and floated down to Billy Creek for our second evening with uneventful lines at Snow Hole and China. A deliciously undercooked lasagna dinner later and we sent the group to bed wearing every ounce of clothing they possessed. Monday started out cloudy but eventually opened up for a bit in the afternoon. The group definitely got the coldest this day, especially during the final 6 miles of hellaciously windy flatwater down to Cottonwood on the Snake. We finally made it to camp and got the group warmed up with an enormous bonfire on the beach. Luckily for us the Snake was moving along pretty nicely with 21,000 CFS coming out of Hells Canyon- almost enough to make up for the 20mph upstream winds and incessant strings of jetsled hullabaloos! Our last day got us to a really wonderful destination, the 410 diner in Lewiston. Happiness prevailed once we got the heat blasting in our truck. A few hours of driving and de-rigging later and I was off to the library for 10 epic hours of paper writing. Lesson- I would always rather freeze floating down a river than write a paper in a stuffy and overheated library. The shower felt pretty good though.
