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!

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.

-Ben

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).

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

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.

For more details on a day of exploring continue below.

At 12:30 on a lovely friday afternoon that brought the first rain of the year to Walla Walla, Oliver Wood, Sophie Davis, Lindsay Cameron and I set off up Mill Creek with a tank full of gas, 2 very large carrots, and a spirit for adventure. After a brief pause at Whitman’s Johnston Wilderness Campus where we had hoped to find Chinook in Mill Creek we continued upwards. A hike at Indian Ridge managed to get us a little lost and we ended up descending through a very recent clear-cut into the N. Fork of the Walla Walla River which sadly had no water in it. Back to the car and we continued up to where the road split. After stealing a large sign that reads “end of road maintenance” from the junction we asked directions from 4 guys in two jeeps, all of whom had very large hand-guns strapped to their legs.  The sent us off towards Dayton where we hoped to find pie- causing us to drive irresponsibly fast in the now quickly accumulating snow in the worry that the bakery might close. One stop and a very hearty renditions of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” on “The Wolf” (country radio station) later we found ourselves descending through a beautiful ridge system towards the back side of the Bluewood Ski resort. The backcountry skiing possibilities look absolutely splendid with nice N. facing glades along most of the ridges. We managed to make it back to Walla Walla by 5:30 just in time for dinner commitments. What a lovely rest-bit from the hectic school life!

A brief update on happenings in the photographic interests of Benny Boots-

Returning from Semester in the West I was scared into hiding in the coast range west of Portland by incredible amounts of snow! I was able to occupy myself pretty well by skiing in downtown Portland, shoveling snow, logging, shoveling snow, building a cedar strip canoe (work in progress), shoveling more snow, and getting vehicles stuck in the snow. Back to school in January and I somehow managed to ski a couple of times a week through most of the winter at Anthony Lakes, Bluewood and local backcountry secrets. Spring break rolled around and I headed down to Utah with the family for a float trip on the San Juan River. The drive back found us at 1 in the morning 200 miles north of Salt Lake in one of the worst snow storms I have every seen, a year of weird weather. I occupied my spring between more skiing and exploring some local paddling spots such as the Palouse and our backyard play spot on Mill Creek. School ended and I was off to the Umpqua for return guide training with Ouzel Outfitters. I split the summer between working some logging at the beginning for Hyla Woods and getting payed to float down rivers! The summer has sadly come to and end, but not without two Salmon trips (one private and one for Whitman), and a brief climbing adventure to Anthony Lakes where Jon Loeffler and I climbed 5.5 couloirs that we plan on skiing this winter. Not a bad summer, but now back to school and all the fun that comes with that.

In the meantime I am on the hunt for a new big photo project. Do you know some organization that wants pictures of a certain river, someone interested in a photo essay about dam removal?

Please, please, please email me if you have any ideas, thoughts, leads, etc. for a photo project of any persuasion.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures and hopefully I’ll have more up soon!

For a bright flash of light considering climate change- written on the Tejon Ranch, grass fed and all organic, continue below…

The Last Generation

Doug McDaniel’s boots rest together at the foot of a stump, his faded blue jeans and white striped shirt juxtaposed against the background of dense Ponderosa Pine corduroy. He kicks at a pinecone, a dark blue baseball cap restraining wisps of light gray hair. His kicking at the pinecone gains speed, angry bouts of energy sending needles and duff flying into the air. His face is hidden behind the baseball cap’s brim, but I can hear his voice cracking. He says that the forest service mismanages their land, forest fires get out of control, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, and bureaucracy runs rampant. He imagines a world in which public and private lands are managed responsibly, with regard for the land, not just for far-flung politics. Doug McDaniel has made the world ecologically healthier in his own way by changing management techniques on his land away from the commercial model in addition to a large river restoration project he has undertaken. In his lifetime the Wallowa River was straightened from a historically meandering channel, put in a trench, and diverted to irrigate cattle pasture; in the last 5 years he’s returned it to where it once was. The river now flows through a winding channel full of eddies, a river where Salmon can spawn. Doug has made a concrete difference through his actions, and will no doubt continue in his efforts, so does it really matter why he did it? Even if he only restored the river so he could go fishing in it like he did as a boy, I don’t really care; he made the world a better place.
The area where we sit is in the middle of a stand of third or fourth growth Ponderosa Pines, thin trunks bunched together, letting through only thin slices of the deep blue sky, splotched with late afternoon clouds tumbling over Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Sitting here, in a forest that was sculpted by humans, cut down by humans, protected by humans from the natural process, and now endangered by humans through climate change, I realize how much we have affected every last little detail of this landscape. Doug McDaniel, the retired logger who owns this land, isn’t the first person to feel strongly about how we should manage our forestlands, but he may be the first to have the luxury of managing the forests not for economic gain, but for his own personal values.
American forestry began well before Europeans even thought about sailing to the west in search of a new land. Native Americans managed forests for thousands of years by burning vast tracts to create grasslands and create particular ecological conditions. At the same time, Europeans were cutting through their forests as fast as possible, the wood going to urban centers for construction and heat.
The moment that Europeans landed on North America and began to settle, sustainable American forestry ended. Extraction techniques developed, accelerated, and forestry moved westward as trees in the east were harvested. As the Northeast was cut over, logging shot westward, razing the great lakes region to a stubble, moving on to the west coast, where the wood was thought to be unending. But even that prophesy fell through, and now we’ve moved on to new unexplored frontiers, British Columbia, New Zealand, Papau New Guinea, Guatemala. But at some point we reached the end of the road. The damage has been done, almost all of our virgin forest has been cut down, burned, built into homes, exported to places that cut their forests long ago, places that in theory learned their lesson before it was too late.
And that’s where Doug McDaniel comes in, his dark boot now kicked into a trough in the duff, needles stuck through the red and black laces, not matching. Doug McDaniel is part of the last generation that could ignore the long-term environmental effects of their actions, and he’s broken with that pattern. His life spent in the woods, first as a faller, then as a forester, and later as an owner, hasn’t gone to waste. He has created an intimacy with the landscape with strong opinions on what is healthy, what is bad, and what needs fixing.
Later in day, riding in the passenger seat of Doug’s white Chevy pickup truck, steel flatbed on the back, I learn a surprising fact: Doug and his wife don’t believe that humans have anything to do with climate change, in fact they’re not even completely convinced that climate change is happening at all. Doug is making changes to his land simply based on his personal observations of forest health; from years spent walking, driving, and riding through his property. No matter his reasoning, he is helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Instead of cutting down trees when they are 30 to 50 years old, Doug McDaniel tries to avoid cutting down a tree until stops growing, sometimes as old as a few hundred years. Doug does it because he likes older, bigger, trees; additionally this allows the tree to sequester more carbon per year as it grows proportionally larger in volume as it gets older. He would rather have a multi-aged diverse forest, than an even aged monoculture crop, so he avoids large clear cuts. The positive global effect is that deforestation from clear cutting releases an estimated 51.8 tons of carbon per acre, whereas healthy forests are able to sequester 41 tons per acre. Doug doesn’t like wildfires; he would rather cut out the younger trees and let them decompose on the ground than risk an out of control burn that could degrade soil health. Forest fires are additionally a cause of global warming that is said to produce as much greenhouse gas per acre burned as the exhaust from 48 cars for one year. Through his changes in forest management Doug has mitigated the effects of global climate change in ways that most of us can only dream of.
By the end of the day, rumbling down a rough dirt road, I am convinced that it doesn’t matter what Doug McDaniel believes at all. What is more important is way that he speaks with his actions. Doug McDaniel has actively worked to make the world a better place. And do I care if our generation recognizes it, or if we disagree and think that he could be doing something better, something different, do it all for different reasons? Not really. He’s doing something different from the tried and true commercial model, a norm that most of the world doesn’t even recognize, and I respect him for that. The reasoning behind why he does it doesn’t matter at all. The image of global climate change is too big and too abstract to effect change in the majority of our population. Simply caring for and knowing a place is all it takes to make a person change their actions for the better.

A brief update-

We spent the last few days with author Sharman Apt Russel at the Lichty Center near Cliff NM. The Lichty Center is part of the Nature Conservancy’s Gila River Farm, 160 acres of what was a farm and ranch, but is now primarily working towards habitat restoration and other conservation objectives. From the Lichty Center we drove about 4 hours to the El Coronado Ranch in Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern AZ. In the next 3 days at the Ranch we will be working on stream surveys, trying to evaluate rock gabian structures built to slow down flash flooding and increase sediment deposition.

For some writing (unattached to much of anything that we’re doing now)- continue reading below. Otherwise, look at pictures and enjoy!

Where Will Our Freshwater Go?

The orange blade of my paddle grates against cold grimy cement, scarred by years of use and abuse. A push, and leaning forward, my yellow pea-pod of a whitewater kayak gains momentum. Seconds of sliding, cold water rushing up my chest, cascades off of my chin, up my nose, dripping from underneath my helmet, down onto my temples, an early morning slap in the face.
Stillness smoothes my smarting face as my boats settles into the eddy. I take my hand off of the paddle and reach down into the crystal water, running along the rough yellow plastic, imagining my fingers able to reach down to the bottom. The bottom, 10 feet below, jagged blocks of cement contrasted through newly deposited silt, sands, pebbles. Pulverized only a month ago by big yellow machines, the work of diesel, heavy leather boots, air-conditioned truck cabs, union work.
I am paddling through history here, between the demolished walls of Marmot Dam, what was the only fish barrier on the Sandy River. I am running a section of the Sandy that has been underwater for triple my lifetime; the dam was built when my parents were children. The walls, crumbling into running water, stare down at me with fascination, what the hell is this kid in a plastic boat doing in my river, what on earth has happened here.
The road I put in from was the access road to the Marmot Dam, a diversion stricture that took water from the Sandy, through an enormous tube, to a reservoir. From the reservoir, a penstock, essentially a steeply sloping pipe, dropped the water down into the Bull Run Power Plant, and ancient cement structure, surrounded by an imposing cyclone fence, not a single window. The kind of place where you find condom wrappers in the parking lot, next to the white company pickup truck. The falling water spun blades in the turbines, making electricity for the cities of Gresham and Portland.
Pulling out of the eddy, following a friend, a lime green and red clad form, bundled in a drysuit against the spring chill, I wonder about the future of what I see here. In 50 years what will we do about electricity, dams, freshwater.
Only .3% of global freshwater is contained in streams, lakes, or rivers.* The rest is split between 68.9% in glaciers or permafrost, and 30.8% in groundwater. So in 50 years, as our climate and cultures change, where will our freshwater be, how will we use it, will we consider it with respect, or will we continue to take it for granted, build cities where there is no water, try to make the grass green without using spray-paint?
As the first wave of the rapid, created by the fallen dam, piles over my head, I take a strong stoke, lean forwards, and close my eyes. The stroke propels me through the frothing mass, and as if by magic, I surface upright on the downstream side. Downstream of where the dam used to be construction evidence scatters over the banks, greenery is a luxury not afforded by this conservation effort. Wet, humid, rainy fertility will take care of the rest, quickly cover the scars of our actions, of any place in the earth where human development is eaten by plants, the Pacific Northwest might rank at the top of that list.
Only shortly downstream the banks cover again with the usual thick vegetation, a dark green layer of ecological comfort. I almost expect salmon to leap with joy out of the now free water, bouncing with surprise into me, delightful smiles on their fishy faces. Their passage upstream is clear, they can swim all the way to Mount Hood.
As my imaginary salmon swims upstream, I continue downwards, but despite these uplifting surrounding, I still worry. Samplings show that 30,000 of Oregon’s 115,000 stream miles “fail to fully support aquatic life”*. In 50 years we are projected to have lost over ½ of the pacific northwest snow pack, salt water intrusion will destroy groundwater in fertile coastal areas, erratic weather patterns will increase already rampant erosion. Are things really getting better fast enough? Can we pull ourselves out of this dangerous dive? These questions run through my head as I navigate through a river restored by a mix of conservation activists, and the lack of economic motivation to re-license the dam site.
As I strap my kayak to the roof of my car at the takeout, I have no idea of what to do. Maybe I shouldn’t have driven today to paddle and photograph a newly free-flowing Sandy River, maybe I shouldn’t even have been born, judging from world population trends, I definitely should not have children, something that luckily isn’t really on my mind this drizzly spring day.
As I drive home my car rattles along the bank of the Columbia River, the gray sheen of windswept water stretching like a plate of steel the half mile to the far bank. Cars rush past me on the freeway, busily flying from one place to the next. Windshield wipers distractedly twitch back and forth and I can only hope that our caffeine accelerated culture notices what we’re doing to water, and what is going to happen to water, before its too late.