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7.14.2013

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

The Fractions

After a successful run of Brown's Canyon, the Hoofers group decided to up our game a half step and hit the Fractions, a section of the Arkansas just upstream of Buena Vista and just downstream of the somewhat-famous Numbers section. Compared to Brown's, the rapids are more narrow, perhaps more technical, much less-commonly rafted, and much more continuous. Since we had shaken down all of our gear and some of our skills the previous day, we were rarin' to go.

The day started out blazingly hot, but we were closer to the source, and after two rapids, I was ready to put my drytop over my short-sleeved fleecy top. The day's scenery was almost exactly like the non-canyon part of Brown's, with more mountains, more cloud cover, and more time spent staring at the water in search of a good, clean line.

I don't remember running into too many rocks, but the eddies were smaller, and the wave trains were so much fun. Any flatwater we had was probably less than 100m long, and the low-water Arkansas pushed us swiftly through those stretches.

The two sketchy rapids on this section are Frogrock (maybe the river left shore looks sorta like a frog when you're approaching the rapid, cause the rocks in the rapid aren't particularly frog-esque), which has 2 big undercuts and a sieve on river right, and House/Elephant/Table Rock (which may or may not actually be different rapids on this stretch - there was a big rock in the middle of the river, and the rapid's named for the rock), which has a big rock in the middle, a log in one chute, and an undercut wall down the other chute. Frogrock was at too low of a level for this rapid to be an issue for us; only the river left channel was open. One person got a solid whack from the wall at House Rock, but there were no other issues.

We splashed and surfed our way down the river, and paused for bigger/better surf waves when they showed up. One of the things I really respect about Hoofers is how safety-minded and education-based the club is. If you're looking to be pushed, you'll get pushed in a hyper-responsible manner. If you're content working on a small skill set, no current members are going to badger you into getting into something bigger or nastier. And when you go looking for help, the club members are not only great boaters but also darned good instructors.

The Fractions was easily the group's best day on the water, and I think a lot of us fell into an easy rhythm of continuous II/III(?) river running. We didn't have a lot of (any?) rescues, everybody was watching out for everybody else, and we were on and off the water in a reasonable amount of time.

House Rock - The undercut wall is behind the boater on the right

The day ended perfectly with a trip to the local hot springs (+ showers) and a visit to Buena Vista's Eddyline Restaurant and Brewery (complete with elk burgers).

Surfin' it up at the BV Play Park where we ended our run

Brown's Canyon on the Arkansas

After months of waiting, sixteen long hours of driving, the most pitiful camping in Grand Island, NE (spoiler alert: it's neither grand nor an island), and one obligatory trip to west-coast boating mecca Colorado Kayak Supply (like NOC's store), we finally made it to stellar camping at Hecla Junction. Our basecamp for the first half of Hoofers Go West 2013 was perfectly situated between Buena Vista and Salida and even more perfectly situated right at a takeout for Brown's Canyon of the Arkansas River. We even had a couple of fourteeners nearby!

Home Sweet Home

Brown's was scheduled as our first trip of the week; it's a pretty good warm-up class III section, and like many stretches of the Arkansas, it's used as a benchmark for determining a rapid's class. Brown's also claims to be the most heavily rafted section of river in the US. Our weekday run was nowhere near an Ocoee "cap day," but I think I might believe the claim anyway.

The first few miles were surprisingly boring. There were some class II boulder gardens and Wisconsin-style wave trains, and the "canyon" part of the name was completely absent. Granted, it was a nice slow entry, but after all the Colorado big-water hype, I was expecting a little bit more. (Our time on the Arkansas was at "low" water - ranging from 600-800cfs. This flow would be considered happily runnable up in Wisconsin, but it makes me really curious what the water looks like at moderate flow in CO. Unfortunately, peak river season directly coincides with fire season; the dry, warm, and windy conditions that melt the snow also foster less-savory events.)

Breezing through the Boulder Gardens

One thing that I can't complain about at all was the scenery. The Ark is in a pretty desert-y area (complete with cacti), and the gorgeous mountains, clear skies, and speed of gear-drying was spectacular. A few miles into the run, we started getting bigger boulders, steeper walls, and better whitewater. I think AW lists something like four class IIIs on the run. We were reading and running almost everything from the boat.

Unfortunately, the first rapid in the canyon caught me off my guard. (Our trip leader called it "Toilet Bowl", but nothing I've seen lists that rapid name for Brown's Canyon). The drop was simple, but the currents at the bottom were super squirrely, and I neither had prepared with some warm-up rolls nor kept my paddle in the water for a brace. I tipped, blew my first panicked roll attempt, felt like I was being recirculated in the feature, panicked some more, ran out of air, and swam. Definitely not my proudest moment. I am well practiced in the art of swimming whitewater, though, so my boat and I made it in the first eddy below the rapid, and several Hoofers wrangled my paddle into the second eddy. I may have been the first swimmer of the day, but I was not the last.

Boulders in the Canyon were only about 10-20x the size of these rocks

As we got deeper into the canyon that afternoon, the raft traffic started showing up. At first it was just a few small (<6 12-person="" ahem="" and="" boats="" bumper-to-bumper="" but="" canyon.="" chute="" come="" conditions="" did="" down="" eddies="" get="" group.="" group="" have="" heart="" in="" interesting="" joy="" large="" managed="" mostly="" nbsp="" next="" of="" one="" our="" p="" plentiful="" reasonably="" so="" the="" through="" to="" trips="" trying="" we="" were="">

The one rapid that we did scout from shore was the biggest of the day (complete with professional photographer): Zoom Flume. We had been expecting Zoom Flume to be around the corner all morning, and finally found it just downstream of a stern-squirt/goofing off eddy. (It may have been a good thing we had a post-stern-squirt-swim just upstream). The rapid had a good number of fun-looking hydraulics, but it was a clean and straight shot down river left. There were a few interesting lines in our group and a great must-make roll, but we cleared the rapid pretty quickly.

One of the Zoom Flume Holes

After Zoom Flume, we started speeding the trip up. The rafts were getting more persistent and the afternoon was starting to pass. There was one other rapid that seemed large-ish, mostly due to it's continuity. (In whitewater, there are a bunch of factors that determine the ease of a rapid: how meaty the features are, how tricky/"technical" the line is, what kind of hazards there are, and how long the rapids are, to name a few.) I was following one of the more novice paddlers through, and though she has a way better roll than me, I tried to catch up when I saw her flip. She rolled back up, plowed through the next hole, and I plowed through the next hole and flipped. The water in this rapid was not crazy-swirly, though, and I managed my first post-shoulder-injury combat roll!! (A combat roll is a roll performed in a rapid, especially when you are not expecting to flip. I think my last combat roll might have been when I was working on the Ocoee, and this may be the first time I have properly rolled with a paddle.)

After the Hooray-I-Actually-Managed-to-Roll-Rapid, we just had a few wave trains and easy IIs until the takout. We hiked around a bit, ate a lot, played some Kubb (pronounced "koob," described as viking chess), stargazed, and turned in.