Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Calapooia River: Headwaters




The Calapooia River was for many years one of the Willamette Valley area runs that was only accessible during hunting season.  Some years the water would line up that early in the Fall, other times it would not.

In 2018 Linn County reached a deal with Weyerhaeuser that the road would become a year round easement used for accessing the Willamette National Forest.  This is good news for boaters, as now any day of the year we can paddle the river.  There is a catch though, and that is that the 9 mile section described on Oregonkayaking.net has ballooned into a 15 mile run, and the section below that lost a couple miles.  The reason for this is that part of the deal is there is no parking along the easement section of the road.  This is all well signed and the rules are as follows:


Upper Calapooia Road

  • The road is open to the public unless the gates are closed. We will post a notification on Linn County's website when we are going to close the gates.
  • The road is posted no parking from the end of the pavement to the national forest boundary. Law enforcement is writing citations to anyone who violates the no parking restriction.
  • There is no legal access to the river from the public road until you get into the national forest.
  • Weyerhaeuser is actively logging in the vicinity so be very cautious and watch out for log trucks

Neither Priscilla or I had run any of the Calapooia before, so this year resolved to check it out.  We started with the lower section, then set our sites on the headwaters.  I didn't have high hopes for this run, but I had seen a photo of a ledge drop and the gradient was around 200 fpm mile so I figured we would get to run a couple new rapids amongst the logs we would surely be dealing with.

We had planned to go just the two of us because of the high probability of a suffer-fest ensuing, but Zach Levine reached out and was game so we met him in Holley with plans to do the headwaters down past the no parking area for a total of 16 miles.

We hit snow shortly after reaching the National Forest boundary, so walked a mile or so through the snow to the put in.  We lucked out with a road I had not seen on the satellite imagery that led right to the put in so there was no bushwhacking necessary.


There was a fun ledge adjacent to the campsite, then a few visible log portages.  We geared up and got ready to parta.

PARTA Time.




Just below the fun ledge were 3 log portages in a row, the first two were easy, the third would have been on the right but we took the problem solving option on the left.  Things moved along for a bit below these logs and there were some ledges amongst more wood dodging. 

The stream bed was good, but the wood had Priscilla on edge.  After a couple more log shimmies and a portage or two she was reaching the edge of her comfort zone.  After an island portage, the wind picked up in a big way for about five minutes.  Trees were waving wildly, shedding limbs into the river and pelting us with hail.  We pulled over to chat in an eddy, while talking over the options a 20' long, 6" diameter tree floated by, Priscilla decided this was the last piece of wood she wanted to avoid for the day and headed up to the road.   Zach and I would meet her at the next bridge, heading downstream quickly so we could pass the floating log before it could wedge itself in a problematic spot. 

Zach and I passed the mobile strainer and pushed on for awhile, but after a short section of wood free creek we reached a braided area with some wood that required scouting and came up with a plan.  We'd hike up to the road, find Priscilla, reload boats and drive down to the National Forest Boundary (which turns out was less than 1/4 mile downstream).  We floated a few options after meeting up with Priscilla, but it was 2PM and she wanted to return when there was enough time to enjoy the remaining section of the Calapooia instead of the option in front of us which was to paddle the remaining 15 miles as fast as we could to get to the end before we ran out of light.  

So instead we decided to head over to Wiley Creek and do a couple laps on Cascade and down through the ledges to the quarry.  Wiley was at a great level, and provided a stress-free finish to the day.

We did the run on 4/5/2019
Pat Welches Calapooia estimate rose from a little over 1,000 cfs to 1,400 cfs throughout the day.


We put in at the Keeney Creek Confluence:  44.240961, -122.360716
And took out 100 yards above the National Forest Boundary:   44.236851, -122.383142

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