Thursday, July 30, 2009

Catch up, Virgin River narrows

I've been out of touch for a few months, with a new job and shabby internet connection, but never fear, I'm back to catch up on my latest trips, starting with the most epic fail of my kayaking career so far, the Virgin River Narrows, BUM BUM BUM BUUUUUMMMMM....


A big strainer...
So on a phone call with my little brother back in April I received an exciting bit of news, we were going to be paddling the Virgin River Narrows, a section of river that spends much of its time in a nasty shriveled dried up state. However, lucky (or unlucky) for me and my adventurous little brother, snow melt had cranked up the flows on this little Utah gem and we were in for the ride of our lives.

Rick getting amped for the Virgin River

The Virgin River is a stretch of whitewater in Zion National Park in Utah, about 950 miles away from my former home of Superior Montana. It winds for 17 miles through an inescapable canyon with some great whitewater and stunning scenery. It is literally the most amazing place I have ever been in a kayak.

But in order to make it through 17 miles of whitewater in a single day, one has to do a lot of planning, and get up really early in the morning. Our crew of three took off at around 8 a.m., early for my beer drinking tastes, but not nearly early enough for the Virgin. With the drastic changes in river levels that come with desert temperatures, we missed the morning high water and spent the first half of the day dragging our boats through barely enough water to float.

Rick, hoping for the Deep Creek Confluence

The Virgin River meets up with Deep Creek seven miles into the trip, changing the class II -IV creeky section into a big water romp through a steep walled in canyon. After our epic struggle through the low water hell that was the first seven miles of the canyon we finally arrived at the confluence of the Virgin River and Deep Creek. It was 6 p.m. and we still had 10 miles to go. We all chowed down a few cliff bars and started booking it down some class III big water rapids



Adding a little flow to the Virgin River before reaching the confluence


At one point in the river, we stumbled across a river wide log just underneath the water, despite screams and signals from Rick and I, our third boater did not see the log and didn't boof over it. He was sucked underneath it and swam. Luckily for him he was able to slip underneath the log and swim to shore. Unluckily for him his boat was long gone before any of us could do anything about it. Our poor pal was forced to spend the next two nights stranded in the gorge because without a kayak, there is no way out.



The canyon walls look like this, it's amazing, but committed...


Leaving someone stranded in the Virgin River Narrows was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do on a kayaking trip, but Rick and I decided that best thing to do at this point would be to push to get out of the canyon as quick as we could so we could do something about getting our stranded pal out asap.



Rich seal launches off a rock on our only portage of the mission


Unfortunately for our plans to make it out of the gorge that evening we ran into another crew of boaters in duckies stranded at a campsite without a paddle for one of their boats. We stopped to help them get two of their boaters across the river along with their ducky and by the time the rescue was complete we had to spend the night in the gorge with the ducky crew. The next day we paddled out with the duckyers. They snapped a few pictures of the gorge for us while we booked it out and notified the park service so they could send in a team to extract our stranded paddler...


The one 15 footer in the gorge. Easily portageable. I ran it. It hurt. More water would have been nice...


Rick warms up by the fire, it was a cold brutal night

The Virgin River killed my jefe grande, sad story...