ebb n' flow: December 2009

I am totally stoked to have gotten to run the Whitewater and Thompson rivers today. None in our group (Baker, Drew, and I) had ever done either of the runs so we enjoyed an entire day of exploration. I was blown away by both the runs and I can't believe it took me this long to explore these rivers for myself. We had perfect flows, the whitewater was top-notch, and the scenery is a notch above the top. We hit the Whitewater first, putting on around 8:30 and with a level of 1 foot, which was really nice.

The "mini" gorge comes quick and it was stout in there. This picture is looking down towards the 3rd drop, which is actually hidden by the cliff. But as you can see, it's tight.

This is looking up at the landing of the first drop (big slide with boof on right). Once again, the drop is hidden.

This is the second drop, the meat if you will. It was really rompin' in there. We spent over an hour scouting the gorge before dropping in. Drew went first and slicked the entire series of rapids. He then came up and played safety/video guy for my run which went equally as smooth. We got a little video but it's so tight in there we could never get the whole gorge. That would take multiple camera angles.

The rest of the river was super-cool with a handful of huge powerful rapids like 55mph and ...merge lane?. The only thing we had (mandatory) to portage was the sieved out drop directly above the mini-gorge.

I enjoyed the hell out of the Thompson River. Instant classic in my eyes. Beautiful paddle and rapids with huge slides. And, you get to paddle into Lake Jocassee, which I've never done. Below is a sequence of Drew running a big slide. This one was sick. Complete with a sieve, shrap metal, and plenty of places to piton.

He's already dropped 20 feet

Catching some air in there. At this point, directly to Drew's left is some dicey shrap metal extending out from a log/rock sieve combo that could cut you, if not kill you.

He's right where you wanna be

nice!

This is the second half of a big slide rapid. The top portion is out of view but drops 30 feet into a mean hole. Then you get to run this down the right. Once again, I got some sweet footage but I'm having tech. difficulties getting it to save in edited format, so I'll post it later.

Check back for video,

So I'm writing about the Toxaway again. I do paddle other rivers, but right now, I've just fallen in love with the Toxaway. Ryan bagged his first trip down a couple weeks ago and came away stoked. Here are some photos from my last couple trips down.

Ryan did the Toxaway! From the grin on his face, he liked the put-in slide. Sorry I didn't get you in action bro, I was dealing with the "piece" camera that day.