Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Lover's Leap

Four months after the fact, we finally headed up nort' for Ali's bday adventure in Pictured Rocks.  Famous as the setting for The Song of Hiawatha and similar to much of the U.P., Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is glorious.  There are 300+ foot rocks stained by all sorts of minerals (black from manganese, red-orange from iron, green from copper, and white from calcium to name a few), and since the cliffs are largely sandstone, the beaches are pristine and the formations are impressive.

Bridal Veil Falls (from kayaking)

Though we started the 6-ish hour drive from Madison as soon as we could Friday evening, we were stuck in an epic campsite-hunt that kept us up almost to 4am.  There are three nearby forest service campgrounds that take reservations (one of which is on an island only accessible by a 9-5 ferry), but we were hoping for one of the first-come park service sites within the actual Lakeshore property.  All the sites were claimed when we arrived at midnight, and all of the sites at the adjacent state forest were taken, too.  We drove for what seemed like forever to get back to the west side of the park, where we went for a last ditch attempt at a "dispersed" forest service campground.  The road down to the Hovey Lake sites was in miserable shape (at least for our little rental car), and all three sites were claimed.  We drove through again and were headed for the boat ramp to sleep in the car when we remembered reading that Hovey Lake was supposed to have four available campsites.  Lo and behold, 10 meters down the boat ramp drive, there was a parking spot and a picnic table!  We had found our basecamp for a few days!!

Pictured rocks, upholstered rocks...  same difference, right?

Saturday morning, we were up with the chickens (and said chickens are on eastern time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) to get into town, get our tires re-inflated, get our backpacking permits for Sunday/Monday, and get to the meeting point for our sea kayaking tour.  Oh, and we also had to find a good spot to pull out our alcohol stove and make breakfast since we were trying to maximize our 3 hours of sleep.  Thank goodness for gas station coffee. 

Kissing Rocks

Once we managed to complete all of our morning errands, we just had to get outfitted and going.  Since we were going through a guide service (waves + stark cliffs + just two not-super-experienced sea kayakers didn't sound good), we ended up with big ol' tandem kayaks and nylon skirts (easier to escape from than neoprene...  also, much more leaky) and ~100 other folks.  They divided us into groups of 5-8 kayaks, but we effectively ruined any group separation there was supposed to be.  Though the morning started out grey and choppy, the sun burned through just in time for our turn-around and lunch.

Mosquito Beach

We got to see some really cool sea caves, "kissing" rocks, baby waterfalls,  and the ever-popular Lover's Leap arch.  Just before Lover's Leap, we were also treated to some crazy teens launching themselves off the cliffs next to this one pock-marked cliff where Ojibwe tribes would supposedly leave enemy chiefs to die in particularly nasty ways. 

Cliff Divers (at the bottom)

Lunch at Mosquito Beach was beautiful and, thankfully, lacking in the beach's namesake critters.  The lake settled in the afternoon, so we got to get really close to the cliffs on the way back.  We had a pretty great swim at the end of the paddle, a good hike around the campground, and a really easy time getting to sleep Saturday night (no thanks to the idiots with some kind of automatic weapon just beyond forest land).

Spray Falls

Sunday, we were up before the sun and were headed to the far side of the park to spot our car for the hike.  We got ourselves together just barely in time for the shuttle, but we managed to get on the trail before 9:00.  The first day, we planned on a rambling 13 miles from the Chapel Rock parking lot, back over to Mosquito Beach, and ending at Pine Bluff (backcountry) campground.  I'm pretty certain that the number of backcountry sites in the park rival the number of frontcountry sites; heck, they may even beat the number of car-camping sites.  We were expecting rain and thunder, and the weather didn't disappoint.  We started off in a super gloom with mild rain.  The canopy sheltered us from the worst of the first storm (out of three, if I remember correctly).  We walked out to Superior along the aptly-named Mosquito River.  Our rain shells helped to shield us from the Minnesota state bird, but lots of DEET and frequent re-applications were still necessary.

Accurate.

There were some nice, miniature falls on the creek we followed, but the best miles were out along the cliffs.  We joined the North Country Trail (a thus unfinished national scenic trail that goes through some of the most bug-ridden parts of WI) out at the actual lake shore.  From there, we got to see Lover's Leap from the east side, Chapel Rock (a really nifty carved out rock that has 3-4 columns and what looks like an altar on top of a pedestal of rock - these columns hold up another platform that's topped by a tree), Grand Portal (a spectacular arch on which we had lunch), Spray Falls (well fed by Beaver Creek), and hundreds of unnamed arches and caves and painted cliffs. 

View from our lunch spot

In addition to the awesome scenery, there were also blueberry shrubs lining the trail - and the berries were at their peak!  We were pretty tuckered out by the time we reached 12-mile beach, but the blueberries were looking even more droopy.  We did our best to ease the bushes' burden all while fueling our last few miles of the day.

 

 

The rain had finally quit by the time we got to camp, but the wind had picked up considerably.  I got our tent set up and kept an eye on our couscous curry while Ali went and bravely flung herself (and our water reservoirs) into the crashing waves of Lake Superior.  Dinner was spectacular, and Tiramisu-Jello (designed by Ali) was a great way to end the evening.  As soon as our food was in the bear locker and our still-sodden clothes were tucked under the fly, we were soundly asleep.

Wind whipping up the waves

Monday's 10-mile hike back to the car was gusty, grey, cool, and much, much faster than Sunday's stroll.  We were in and out of the pine and deciduous patches of woods, hovering by the beach and even more (!!) blueberries than the previous day.  A bit beyond halfway, my ankle started complaining, and an unfortunately chilly lunch made it all the more stiff and uncooperative.  Our trekking poles came to the rescue, and  I hobbled past the first two road crossings without too much trouble. 

Grand Portal from the less-grand side

There was a really cool section of birch forest just past Hurricane Creek.  Though the section of Pictured Rocks we saw was sheltered by Grand Island and largely in a bay, the trees here were as gnarled as some of the woods on less-sheltered Superior coastline.  Unlike certain trees near the Porcupine Mountains' shore, these had an odd sort of majesty.

Falls on the Mosquito River

The terrain was unkind to my weary ankle in the twists and turns near Hurricane Creek, but one more road crossing, and we were back to the beach and our car.  Just as we were packing up, a ranger stopped by to make sure we weren't heading out in such brutal winds.  Hopefully, the hikers we passed mid-trail made it out without incident.

Chapel Rock

A root as big as many trunks connects the tree to the rest of the cliff

150k Dairyland Dare & Wolf River Rafting

Ok, so this is a bit of a placeholder, but a few thoughts:
(1) 150k is a surprisingly doable bike distance, especially when your 10,000ft of climbing is rolling dairyland at completely reasonable 60-70F temperatures.  Also, mist rising off of farmland can be almost as spectacular as certain mountain vistas (another shocker, eh?).
(2)  Wolf Section IV is a great place to raft at pretty much any water level.  It's also a great place to teach rafting.  Some day, I will run Big Smokey Falls with a clean line; it may take a few more tries and some good water.

Black Earth Hilltopper (+ the best bail ever)

This weekend, Ali and I decided to have a nice, relaxed couple of days with each other.  Naturally, that means that we spend the first day of the weekend on an 80+ mile bike ride!  We've got the Dairyland Dare 150/200k ride coming up in early August, and while biking to frisbee games helps, it's certainly not going to be enough. 

We got up way earlier than I was hoping, and hit the road as soon as we could get our lunch from the grocery store.  I was dragging the first 10 miles, but we eventually got into a decent rhythm.  We paused for a snack at a park in Black Earth 20 miles into the ride, and we thought we might be good to do the whole route from there.  The Bombay Bike Club's ride had been relatively hilly (as advertised) by this point, but we knew it would only get worse as we continued toward Blue Mounds (home of the Horribly Hilly Hundred).
There were two pretty staunch climbs on our approach to Blue Mounds that sapped all of our energy.  I was willing to be an ok sport and just keep going, but thankfully, Ali decided there was no way either of us were making it up the final climb to Blue Mounds State Park, so we took a detour over to the rail trail and had lunch.

We saw millions of cornflowers on our ride

Once we were off the original route, we chose to stay on the nice, flat Military Ridge State Trail and coast back into Madison.  Of course, since we were going through Mt. Horeb anyway, we might as well stop at Stewart Lake County Park for a dip.  And, ya know, since keeping to a schedule was no longer an issue, we could always duck into the Grumpy Troll for a pint and some deep fried green beans (delicious, by the way).  As you can probably tell, our decision to bail on the Hilltopper was excellent.  The second half of the ride was incredibly fun and well worth the 45 tough miles it took to get there.

Stewart Lake

We did finish up with 85ish miles for the day; I'm not sure we would have made it too much further, but hopefully, we'll be ready for the Dare.

Deciding to circumnavigate the Mound

Hoofers Go West 2013

The previous five posts document a trip taken by 12 reasonably-to-well experienced Hoofer Outing Club members out in Colorado ("R3s" and up).  The trip was divided pretty evenly between great and not-so-great paddlers, and it was intended to help bring us not-so-great folks up a notch.  (If anything, I might have had a bit more humility pounded into me.  Some of the IIIs that may not have even been IIIs were tougher than the IV-s I've paddled previously!)

You can find info on the rivers we ran at americanwhitewater.org (a great resource for the whitewater community) and info about the club at hooferouting.org.

If you're looking for more/better photos of the trip, try the links below:
Photos from the Trip Leader
Helmet Cam Video
Another Hoofer's Blog

Cache la Poudre (Upper Rustic and Lower Mishiwaka)

Our group made it into the Poudre Gorge around 10pm Thursday evening.  Following a debacle involving a sketchy campground host (who was either senile or running a scam, my  money's on the latter), cars arriving at different times, no cell service, and a delayed food car, we may have set up camp and started cooking by midnight. 

We camped right by the Narrows of the river (some class IV/V+ mank), and we seemed to be right at the top of the old burn line.  Unlike the Royal Gorge area, it was very clear that a fire had impacted the area.  Forest Service personnel have apparently been dumping hay from helicopters and taking on several other rehabilitation projects in an attempt to minimize further damage to the area.

Friday morning, we woke up with the plan to get on the Upper Rustic section of the river (class III/IV).  Looking back at the American Whitewater page, the section was below "runnable" flow by about 130cfs.  We had a slow morning and a tough time finding a non-private stretch of river to use as a put-in, but eventually, we slid into a rocky, strainer-filled river.  The water was dark, and there were clouds overhead, but most of my attention was on getting through the maze of partially-submerged rocks.

At some point, we realized our group of 12 was just too big to navigate such a scrappy river, and we broke into two groups.  Not long after, I experienced yet another bout of poor judgement that resulted in a swim.  I was sandwiched between two great paddlers with a bunch of other people about my skill level, and instead of reading the river for myself, I decided to happily follow the group of people in front of me.  The one problem:  I saw where they were currently floating on the river, but I had been catching an eddy instead of watching how they got down the river.  I blithely followed them river-right of a boulder, into a narrow, shallow passage that I did not successfully navigate.  (Everyone else had gone for the much wider and deeper slot on river left.)  I flipped leaning back, and while I managed to protect my face, my knuckles took a bunch of scrapes.

Mind you, this accident was maybe a half mile into the run.  I decided to pull off since my judgement and abilities were clearly not as good as they should be (and my hand was hurting pretty badly), the leaders shortly encouraged other folks off the river, and after a bit of a scout, nobody wanted to finish the run.  We practiced some more rope team to get the boats up to the road and headed off to Ft. Collins for some choice beverages.

It was not to be.  The rain that started while we were roping boats washed a ton of mud and some really large boulders into the road between our campsite and town.  We returned to camp and ended up hiking and playing cards until dinner.  (It was still a pretty nice, albeit wet, afternoon.) 

On our last day in Colorado, we went down to an easier 3-mile section of the Poudre.  Crews had come through with bulldozers and cleared the road, but we wanted to be close to town and finished early in case the next line of forecasted storms closed the roads again.  After the previous week's bumps and scrapes, I was not half as confident in my paddling abilities.  Though the river was class II and horribly rocky at our level, I was gripping my paddle for dear life the whole run.  (Tightening up is a pretty rookie mistake; if you don't keep your waist and hips relaxed, you aren't able to accommodate the bumps the water throws at you.)

Thankfully, we made it down this stretch with no major problems.  We did break one of the cheap club paddles when it was used to brace a paddler, but the Lower Mishiwaka section was otherwise uneventful.

Salida Play Park

Following a rough day on the Royal Gorge, we decided to take an easy day in Salida.  We slept in, headed into town for lunch, and then had a couple hours to tour the area and check out the play park.  Like Buena Vista, Salida has the river running straight through town.  Both cities decided to put in some play features, and tons of people (both locals and tourists) take to the water.

The town itself is relatively small; there's a 4x2 block downtown, the river, some housing sprawl, and a highway section with some chain restaurants and gas stations.  Salida's downtown has a couple outfitters, a river repair shop, tons of boater grub/pub spots, and a gazillion art galleries.  Some of the artwork hanging was incredible.

Our Fearless Leader on the Wave

We were only in the water for two hours, but the features kept us pretty entertained.  I got a fair amount of roll practice from this little trashy hole that I was supposed to be jetting through in order to catch the glossy front-surf wave.  I passed the wave once and was worn out in no time.  Some others in our group had more luck catching the wave, but the easily-accessible hole features were a bit better for me.

Our group was off the water and headed up towards Ft. Collins a few hours later.

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