Eagle Creek V-V+

Eagle Creek is located in the Columbia river gorge, about 40 minutes east of Portland. The trail is a popular destination for hikers and waterfall gazers, as well as kayakers looking to huck. The hike-in is 4 miles on a well maintained and fairly mellow trail that in some places runs beneath miniature waterfalls coming off the canyon walls. After a mile or so, you will catch a glimpse of 90 foot Metlako Falls. Just past this is Punchbowl Falls, a 30 foot drop that proved to pack a good punch. After several more miles we crossed a bridge in the narrowest part of the gorge and then saw Skoonichuck Falls around the bend. This drop is the put-in for the run and consists of a 35-40 foot drop followed immediately by a nice 15 foot ledge. 

Punchbowl Falls as seen from the trail.

Megan Harpham on the hike-in. Photo courtesy of Chris Baer

Orion Meredith and Crisler Torrence demonstrate the mystery carry.

Crisler Torrence probing Skoonichuck Falls on his birthday bash. photo: Chris Baer

Dustin Stoenner rolling into the same drop.  photo: Chris Baer

Dustin hitting a sweet boof on the second tier of the double drop. photo: Chris Baer

Martin Belden melting into Skoonichuck Falls. photo: Chris Baer

Chris Baer on the same drop. 

Martin on a nice boof somewhere in the gorge.

The crew in the Eagle Creek gorge. photo: Chris Baer

Chris Baer goin for the log grind. 

Martin boofin away at Punchbowl Falls, and getting ready for a hard hit. photo: Chris Baer

Orion Meredith going for the sweet melt. photo: Chris Baer

Megan Harpham. Swimming? Nope, just a white boat. photo: Chris Baer

Dustin Stoenner comin in hot. photo: Chris Baer

Eagle Creek trailhead is located at exit 41 on I-84 heading east. There is no west-bound exit, as we found out only too late, and drove 20 miles past the off ramp. This run is a fun hike and huck mission, but a bit of a novelty run as well. Between the put-in drop and Punchbowl there are a handful of fun slides and boofs as well as one cool mini gorge, but mostly the rapids are shallow class 2 boogie water. Even so, this run is awesome and definitely worth the hike all the way in to the upper double drop. I highly recommend this run to anyone lookin to huck some of Oregon's finest. 

Steinacher Falls

Peter

Martin

Chris

Crisler

Steinacher Creek is a small tributary of Wooley Creek, which is itself a tributary of the main stem Cal-Salmon. 

New River Gorge

The New River in northern California is one of the best class 4-5 runs in the state. It starts out with several miles of mellow, scenic paddling before dropping into a committing gorge, chock full of fun and stout rapids. Once you have entered the main gorge the only exit is out the bottom, at the confluence with the Trinity River  in Burnt Ranch Gorge. This run sees very little attention, which is surprising given the quality whitewater that lies within its walls.  

The view from Highway 299 of the last part of the gorge, just downstream out of the picture is the confluence with the Trinity.

Orion and Crisler scouting the first rapid of the gorge.

Matt Porter running the first drop.

Damon Goodman runs the second gorge rapid. This is the entrance move in a larger rapid.

Chris Shehab running the second part of the previous drop. 

Looking back upstream from the top of the third rapid.

Orion Meredith runs a nice boof to start out the third drop.

Paul Fritze coming in hot at the bottom of the same drop.

O-face on a nice in-between boogie rapid.

Martin Belden running the bottom drop of the portage. This angle does not do the drop justice. It starts off up around the corner with a 7-8 foot sloper into a tight boxed-in hole. This bottom drop has to be run just left of center to avoid a nasty kicker flake on the right, but not too far left because of the bottom hole which feeds into an undercut.

Crisler buried in the same drop. 

Blind Faith. This drop lies just below the portage and gets its name from the fact that it would be very difficult, bordering on impossible to scout or portage. Run left and enjoy.

The crew below Blind Faith, deep in the goods.

Tombstone rapid. Crisler is just visible in the center of the photo probing the undercut. Yeehaw.

Matt Porter going for a mystery move in Tombstone.

Paul Fritze also enjoying the upstream view of the rapid. There was a nasty little f-u rock somewhere on the right side of the drop that was giving people a free back-paddling clinic.

Martin Belden dropping in to the top part of Tombstone.

The Russian (Peter) with a sick flake boof. Unfortunately it landed on rock, but looked steezy anyways.

O-dizzle, Tombstone.

Final Falls money boof. Orion Meredith.

Crisler cashing in some sky miles on the New.

Chris Shehab. Boofin away.

Damon Goodman styling Final Falls.

The final drop to the confluence with the Trinity consists of a semi-continuous section of class 4+ drops that is too much fun to even describe.

To reach the New River, follow Hwy. 299 to Hawkins Bar, just east of Willow Creek. Turn North on the Denny road and follow it for around 16 miles until there is a small dirt road that branches off on the right, and drops down a steep hill. At the bottom of the road there is an old campsite. Follow the trail from the parking area downhill to the river, and enjoy the ride.

We had flows of around 800-1000 cfs, which was perfect. This drainage is prone to rising very rapidly during and after heavy rainfall, and would become scary as hell with too much water. Avoid putting on during heavy rains or when the river looks like chocolate milk, and have fun.

Van Duzen Race Series

It wouldn't feel like a race without at least a little carnage.

Well, it's about damn time the rain started coming down, and with it came the first Van Duzen race. We had 16 boaters turn out for the first race last Sunday, with a flow of around 8500 on the gauge at Bridgeville. After the success of this first race, we decided to turn it in to more of a race series. There will be multiple races held throughout the spring every time the Duzen peaks over 6000 cfs. This means on days when the gauge hits 6 grand, get your boats and butts to the takeout by 4 p.m. and the race will begin at 4:20, which seems appropriate given our location. 

The results from last weeks race are as follows:

1st place: Crisler 

2nd place: Martin Belden

3rd place: Orion Meredith

4th place: Dustin Stoenner

Other participants included (and I am sorry if I get last names wrong, or if they are lacking all together):

Ben York, Lou Jacobsen, Melissa Demarie, Paul Gillingham, John Hyland, Paul from Adventure's Edge, Megan Harpham, Lila Owen, Chris Shehab, Byron, Casey, Matt Titre.

Thank you all for coming out and making this race happen. Also, a big thanks to Wes Schrecongost for taking some great photos and to Will Parham for facilitating the start and finish. 

The Columbia Experience

Check out this link to the Columbia Experience website. Paul Gamache, organizer of the Cali-Burn Fest and the Cal-Salmon Nordheimer race, is back at it. This time, he has put together a crew with the intent of running the Columbia river from source to sea. The trip will cover over 1200 miles, 14 dam portages, and over 50 days. 

http://www.thecolumbiaexperience.com

"Grand Canyon of the Mad" IV-V(P) Photo dump

Dustin enjoying one of the rare deep spots on day one.

View of the beginning of the canyon below Pilot Creek.

Our first portage. You can see the sieve on the right side of the photo that scared us away.

Mad River Canyon

Upper portion of one of our first big rapids on day two.

Looking back upstream at the same rapid. Most of the drops we ran were like this. 

Dustin lining up a nice boof in the gorge. 

Downstream view of the canyon.

This is one of the burliest looking sieved out rapids that we saw. Both drops to the left of the rock dropped onto rocks with sieves below, and the right side of the rapid flushed through a sieve and then down a 20-25 foot cascading drop.

Dustin enjoying a beautiful canyon vista, and wondering if it ever ends.

Looking downstream above a nice drop in the canyon.

Upstream view of the canyon.

Dustin styling a sticky ledge drop.

Martin running another good rapid in the canyon.

Dustin scouting up a fun drop with a nice set of ledges upstream. 

Tired, hungry, and covered in mud. Cheap salami never tasted so good. 

Dustin in the final flatwater stretch before the take-out.

"Grand Canyon of the Mad" IV-V(P) write-up

As with all good plans, this one hatched in the midst of grand frivolities, and as such, was guaranteed to be exciting and potentially epic. The plan was formulated around bits of beta gathered a few weeks earlier from Ben Wartburg, Alex Wolfgram, and Charlie Center who had tried to run the stretch in a day, but were forced to hike out in the dark, through thickets of poison oak.  Not wanting to repeat this experience, Dustin and I planned on bringing overnight gear and doing a two day run down this same section. The plan was to put-in at the bridge in the town of Mad River on Highway 36. We would then paddle around 10 miles of flatwater and small gravel bar rapids, until the beginning of the main gorge below the confluence with Pilot Creek. Our second day would consist of paddling the middle and lower parts of the gorge and the 3-4 miles of flatwater before the take-out at the put-in for the Swinging Bridge run on the Mad. 

How it really happened:

We put on early Friday morning, sun shining and warm. Perfect, or so we thought. The flows when we checked them before leaving on Thursday afternoon had been holding around 1200 c.f.s. at Arcata, which we thought would be adequate water. By the time we put on the flow had dropped to around 900 c.f.s., which in the upper region of the watershed, meant trouble for us. instead of paddling through nice deep pools and splashing down ripples, we were dragging our boats and getting stuck on every rock in every ripple for around 8 miles and 5 hours. Finally with the confluence of Pilot Creek doubling our flow, we were able to make good time for the remainder of the day. After entering the beginning of the gorge and paddling several sweet, but sievy rapids, we came to our first big horizon line. We started to bomb this one like all the rest, but found ourselves scrambling for an eddy after making the first drop of the rapid. Downstream was a sick looking boof, followed by 90 percent of the flow slurping down one of the largest sieves I have ever seen. We decided that this one might be worth looking at. After giving her a good look, we also decided that our balls felt really small all of a sudden, and neither one of us wanted anything to do with the drop. By this point it was late in the afternoon, and feeling that we had made adequate progress for the day, we decided to camp in a nice meadow above the river. As we found out the next day, we should have kept paddling.

The next morning we were stoked heading around the corner from camp and running some fun class 3-4 boulder gardens in a beauty of a canyon. Pretty soon we started getting into some of the goods and the pace and difficulty began to pick up. Both of us were thrilled that after paddling so much flatwater and scraping the day before, we were finally getting into the shit. We expected that the main part of the gorge, with the majority of the stout rapids, would be about 4 miles with maybe another 3 miles after that of mellow class 3-4. We quickly began to realize that this was not gonna be the case as we came to successively larger horizon lines, with bigger and more numerous sieves. In some rapids the entire flow would dump under several large house sized boulders, and then pour down a jagged pile of boulders, with no real line through, unless you have a scuba tank and some hockey pads. Our takeaway thoughts from this second day in the gorge can be summarized in the list below.

1. Portages suck

2. Portaging up near vertical mudslide walls sucks even more, especially when the mud is knee deep.

3. Really big sieves, everywhere. 

4. Unfortunately placed rocks in almost every good looking boof.

5. The rapids last way longer than we expected.

By around 5:30 in the evening of the second day, with no end to the rapids in sight, and darkness closing in we decided we would have to spend an extra night. We found a nice little clearing some dry wood, and got a nice fire going to dry our sweat soaked gear after the brutal portages.

The next morning we put on the river cold and hungry, and dreading more portages. Luckily for us, we had just one more little walk, and then after a few more read-and-run rapids we came to the flats that marked our home stretch to the take-out. 

Although there are some fun rapids, and the canyon is one of the most pristine and beautiful I have ever seen, I don't think that we will be making another trip down this section. With additional flow, some of the rapids that looked unrunnable on our trip might fill in and go, but it would make most of the rapids we did run pretty sporty.

To get to this run follow Hwy. 101 the junction with Hwy. 36. Take the 36 east until the bridge in the town of Mad River. Put in next to the bridge and have fun.

Some saweet pics of the canyon coming soon...