Royal Gorge

For Day 3 of Hoofers Go West, we took another step up for the Royal Gorge.  The Gorge is a III/IV run, with potentially three class IVs (Sunshine Falls, Sledgehammer, and Wall Slammer, depending on the level and who you ask).  If we had gone with fresh muscles and rested minds, we might have had a pretty good run.  This was the third day, though, and everyone was feeling a little sluggish and a little sore.  Great lead in, eh?

Sunshine is maybe the fourth rapid on the run.  It's before you get into the true gorge, and the three rapids upstream were nothing to sneeze about.  They had big waves, mildly sticky holes, and, depending on your line and angle, well-hidden boulders.  There were several folks that flipped and even swam in El Primero, El Segundo, and Pumphouse; some flips were from inattentiveness and sloppy paddling, but many were due to lack of knowledge about the river and lack of scouting.

Top of Sunshine

By Sunshine, the experienced folk had decided that less-experienced folk should walk the rapid and set safety.  Getting the boats up and down the boulder fields was a feat, but we managed without as much as a twisted ankle.  We set two rope teams at the most powerful hole in the rapid and had a pair of collection-boaters down at the end.  The first three boaters down had squeaky clean lines that hedged around the monster hole, but the fourth boater, a Hoofer alumnus, lined up to go into the hole sideways (never a good idea).  He corrected at the last minute, but hit the meat of the hydraulic with no momentum.  From the safety-rock, we got a nice view of the hole pulling his boat back in, flipping him, surfing him upside down, window-shading him, and the beginning of his swim.  He came out of the hole near the bottom of the river, so our ropes were of little use.

Big Hole in Sunshine (Roughly 1.5 boat-lengths wide)

Our swimmer also had the poor luck of getting his PFD unzipped by the river.  (There is a very good reason why whitewater boaters don't like having things dangling from our life jackets and a very, very good reason why we never attach things to our zipper pulls).  Thankfully, he did have one safety buckle, so while his swim was uncomfortable, he did have some extra flotation.
 

From that point on, we started hitting more raft traffic and started spending more time in micro-eddies waiting for our lead boats to scout rapids.  At the mouth of the gorge, I was with a small group waiting for one swim to be cleaned up below us and one swim to get cleaned up above us.  The trip leader popped up on the railroad track and signaled us to walk the far side of the river.  The far side of the river turned into a cliff, so we ferried back across the river and had a fun hope-the-train-doesn't-come half hour of portaging.  The gorge was getting steep enough that we struggled to get the boats up the the tracks and belayed them back down to the river on rope (through a steep boulder field - this was becoming a hallmark of the day's run). 

Trying to stay in a pseudo-eddy for 30min

Once we were around Sledgehammer, we had a few more long miles of wait-while-two-people-scout, run-1/4-mile, and repeat through the gorge.  This section was pretty in a stark-cliffs and is-that-a-thunderstorm kind of way, but as you can probably tell, we were worn out and slightly unhappy by this point.  A lot of people had been flipping every other rapid, there were storms passing, and the daylight hours were flying by.  To be fair, we were paddling in Colorado, so we were by far the happiest grumpy people you could ever meet.  (Everyone was shockingly happy and incredibly pleasant.)

Since entering the gorge, we had been doing the stop-go dance in an attempt to find and scout Wall Slammer (the rapid which everything describes as right below the funky suspended railroad bridge in the gorge).  Not to say that the scouting wasn't useful, but it did suck up a lot of time before we got to Wall Slammer.  When we finally found our last potential class IV, all the less-experienced folk (myself easily included) were weary.  The leaders allowed most people to run the rapid, and since I had clean runs on all the other rapids, I was looking for a step up.  Bad idea.  I should have known that my mental acuity was blown.  I focused on the top half of the rapid, through the sorta big hole, and then expected that I'd be able to avoid the undercut wall at the bottom of the rapid.

Top of Wall Slammer

I cleared the top half of the rapid pretty easily.  I should have angled slightly away from the wall to get through the "big" hole and paddled hard away from the wall the instant that I could.  Instead, I think I went through the hole straight on the wall-side, turned toward the wall, and took too much precious time setting an angle away from the wall before paddling hard.  The results included a bit of spellunking, a bit of a roll, some new helmet scratches, swim practice, climbing practice (on belay and everything), and spectator-scaring.  I found the absolute worst place in the river to swim after a poor choice and a poor line, and I'm not particularly proud of that.  (I think I did make the Hoofers Carnage Reel.)

The undercut wall that gives Wall Slammer its name

From Wall Slammer Down, the river became much more approachable.  Big wave trains, splashy/relatively consequence-free rapids, and the end of the gorge.  We paddled pretty hard to get off the river before dusk and made it just in time.  Thankfully, the low-head dams in Canyon City were well marked and reasonable to get around. 

Everyone collapsed at the takeout, and we had a bit of an adventure finding an open restaurant in Salida before 11.  (Thank you Pizza Hut!!!)  We returned to camp slap-happy and were asleep within seconds of closing our tents.

Pizza in a closed gas station, because we're classy like that