Knoxville LVM 27 premier

West Prong of the Little Pigeon

December 29, 2008
Around 3.60" at Newfound Gap the previous day
Level was 1.3'ish around 8am, 1.1' around closing time, perfect level all day long

I went up to the West Prong to be a cheerleader and take a few photos. It was a pretty typical Saturday for the WP: 20+ boaters I haven't seen since the last rain, several pins, some wood encounters, a broken boat, and all smiles at the bottom.

Rock stall midway in room without a view

Reed charging into the dark room

The chunky line thru amtrack

Picture Perfect...well not really, but that's the rapid...it's looks smaller on camera

Bett giggling on down to the picnic area

A few fired up Dinosaur that day too, much bigger and longer than the picture suggests. This is the largest and final drop of 4 distinct drops in quick succession. I think this dude's name was Parker...

Having fun with sieves

After arriving at the upper section of California's Silver Fork for some poached camping at the put-in, we found a very entertaining sieve, which happened to be the very first rapid. We killed some time by throwing sticks into the sieve to watch them disappear, and it quickly progressed to rather sizeable logs.



The next morning we decided to put on, and found the run to be pretty low quality and extremely hazardous. The flow we had was way too high, and the run was loaded with sieves, with all the water going into the wrong places. The run's named according to the Stanley Holbeck bible is "Dugalt Bremner" (sp?), after he tragically died in one of the many sieves the run has to offer.

John and Nick debating about whether to continue into a comitting gorge or not. We decided it best to hike out, which was a good decision as we met a crew later who went into the mentioned gorge and was forced to do some scrambling/climbing out.

Some oldies...

In looking through my old stash of videos, I found a few old ones from around the southeast.

The first one is from the quality portage fest, North Pole. It's not too often those words blend together, but it is a quality portage fest. The rapids you portage are horrible and scary looking, and the ones you run are actually really fun. Just be sure to scout everything, as almost every rapid goes underground somewhere, especially the portages...



The second one is from Alabama, Jones creek. It's another quality portage fest, but with less portages and more difficult whitewater. This was a fun day as it was one of John's first introductions to "creeking," and we outfitted him with some duct-taped foam elbow pads. He of course ran the shit while we walked with our tails between our legs. It was a fun day to run with the Chattanooga boys.

South Merced

This was our closing run for our trip back in 2005. (I haven't been kayaking lately, so I'm forced to rehash some old kayaking memories of better times...)


South Merced is an incredible run, certainly one of my favorites. Great boogie all day long, for 2 days. Some big slides and looooong boulder gardens. Also some of the best camping available in California

Highlights:

a) Deciding to drive all night from South Silver to catch it the next morning over multiple Sierra Nevadas, bought with scavenged money

b) Firehydrant

c) Johnny Webb taking a fully loaded boat to the back during a portage, amazingly unscathed

d) Waking up on day 2 to 3 broken, shattered, and memberless boats. The group upstream had left their boats too close to the water as it came up overnight, taking their boats on downstream. 2 boats were marginally paddleable, 1 was entirely destroyed. One owner also lost all of her paddling gear and was forced to hike out...oddly enough without a knight in shining armour, going it alone through Yosemite wilderness.

e) Nate McDade eating what he thought was the hiker's food, found in a drybag way down river. Afterwards, he found that he was stuffing his face with a fellow group members lost food, who had to go hungry because he never found it.


It was a great closing to our CA tour. Certainly one of the state's finest runs

Infinislide

So let's see, in catching back up with this blog from over 2 years ago, we'll revisit Dinkey Creek's Infinislide.

We came back after a scary high water run to find it at and excellent flow, and capped the day with great runs through the slides all the way to the campsite.

I can't remember what the flow was exactly, but I think it was around 700cfs above North Kings, back in early June of 2005.




Again, not too much extra to say other than the slide is incredible and we were all out of breath by the end of it.




Below Infinislide is some quality slides and rapids, all the way to the campground

California's Green River: South Silver

There's a lot of similarities between California's South Silver and North Carolina's Green River. Both have more people on them on a weekend than you can shake a fist at, and both a "the big one." Only exception is that the Green runs year 'round...
I know everyone has been there and done that, but why not some more video...

The very popular Upper Cherry

Upper Cherry Creek seems to be somewhat of a cornerstone for California overnighters. Seems as though everyone has at least seen it in videos and pictures, if not in person. Still, with all the hype, it's one of the few rivers that lives up to it.

Overview:

Hike 12 miles, through black clouds of misquitoes, literally...

Good idea: save weight by hiking in booties
Bad idea: listening to randy robberson and hiking in booties which were too small, thinking they would stretch out...

Result: two blackend toenails with a plethora of pain

Paddle a little over 12 miles of stupendous granite whitewater, too excellent for words

The portage route on the lead into Double Pothole...much, much scarier than I thought, but not nearly as scary as when you peel around the undercut below into the main rapid

Pat, sole contenter for the Pocket, as well as the Bear

A nice gift from the California locals...

I don't really have anything else to say that hasn't already been said before; it's one of the best overnight runs I've ever done and can't wait to come back, this time with better hiking shoes...