Little Klickitat

-By Nate Merrill

Hanging out with friends on Friday night, I expressed my feeling that the following day was going to turn into a circus. I had to laugh when my buddy Skip replied "When was the last time you went Kayaking and the trip didn't turn into a show?" It was true! After spending Tuesday driving up to the Olympic Peninsula only to get skunked and leave the area without putting boat to water, I too was having a hard time remembering my last trip that went off without any unforeseen problems. That being said, we had hatched a semi-cunning plan to ensure we were able to take advantage of the recent rainfall. With levels sky high around Portand and the Western Cascades, the group set our sites on the Little Klickitat drainage just outside of Goldendale, WA. Despite the LK being known as a run that only comes in with immense rainfall, the gauge for the rairly run creek was actually around 300-400 cfs higher than recommended flows. Given this fact, we decided that are backup plan would be to run Canyon Creek (LK trib) if indeed the LK was too high.
The next morning rolled around and as the group assembled and began loading boats, the rain continued to come down in sheets around Portland. Dan Rubado, Emile Elliot, Ryan Cole, Jacob, and myself all piled into Dan's new VW Sportwagon (45 mpg!) and headed east. After meeting up with Joe Stumpfel, John Edwards, and Matt Horton in Hood River, we beat feet up past the normal LK takeout to inspect Canyon Creek. With no eddies in sight and thick brush lining the banks, we decided that Canyon Creek was far too high to run with any regard for safety. It was the Little Klickitat today and it was juicy. (1300cfs? - The gauge was doing funky things when we put-on the creek NOTE: This was the old gauge, on the new gauge that would be a more medium flow) We quickly rallied back to the takeout, met up with some other paddlers from Hood River, and set shuttle.
The group, which had now ballooned out to nearly 20 people, opted to break up into smaller platoons to better handle the high water and the potential scarcity of large eddies. Sticking with the crew from Portland, we geared up and were just about to put-on the creek when another boater came into view walking up river. The conversation was brief but it I did catch the words "Swim", "Lost Gear", "No Eddies", and "Unscoutable". He was gone in a flash and everyone was left just a little less confident than they had been a moment earlier. This is where Ryan Cole stepped up in a big way. Having run the creek several times before, he offered to lead the run and delivered excellent beta throughout the day.
As soon as the boats hit the water, the true nature of the creek reveled itself. The creek, which was in the bushes, was colored a murky brown (probably had a lot to do with the copious amounts of cow dung in the surrounding area. yum) After floating for only a few minutes, we found ourselves rounding a bend and floating into the first big rapid of the day. Ryan had warned us to stay as far right as possible to avoid being swept into a nasty crack in the middle of the river. At this flow, there was no viable eddy above this drop and it snuck up quick! We all made the move to the right without difficulties and were able to catch a small eddy downstream and regroup. (I believe that the group we encountered hiking off the creek ran into trouble when they attempted to run the far left side of this drop.)From this point on, the creek never really let up. Big rapids were separated by fast moving boogie water. There were times when we would travel over a mile without seeing an available eddy to slow down.
A short distance below the initial drop, we came to the single most technical drop on the creek. This long boulder garden was scoutable on the left and had several pushy lines to chose from. After discussing the different options, Dan and I decided we had seen enough and returned to our boats to probe the center line. We pealed out and ran the lead-in without any problems. The next part is a little fuzzy in my memory: it all happened in the span of 3-5 seconds. After boofing over a rock near the top of the drop, I attempted to take a left stroke when agonizing pain shot through my shoulder and I realized that I couldn't move my left arm. I had somehow dislocated my left shoulder (not really sure how, but I didn't throw any brace) and was fast approaching the crux of the drop. After nearly rolling over in shock, I was able to reset my shoulder using a paddling motion and finish the drop upright, but in considerable pain. I consider myself very lucky to have gotten the shoulder back in so easily.
After catching an eddy and watching the rest of the crew come though, we took a break and discussed to option of me hiking off the creek. Several folks volunteered to help me with the hike out, but at this point, Skip's words from the night before were resounding in my head: "When was the last time you went boating and things didn't turn into a show?" After resting for a good twenty minutes, I decided that I was going to keep paddling. The shoulder hurt, but my range of motion wasn't being hindered and I felt I could continue on without putting the group (or myself for that matter) at risk.

John Edwards and Jacob board the freight train.

Ryan Cole is In Like Flynn

We got back on the creek and started bombing downriver. The next two drops came up in quick secession. The first we scouted from the right. It featured a nasty boulder pile in the middle but was fairly clean down the right bank, with only minor hole punching required.

Extra Frothy.

The second drop (we refereed to this one as the slide) was scoutable on the left but required committing to the rapid and catching a last chance eddy. It looks scary, but I promise, there is a large eddy on the left! You just can't see it from above. Faith! The drop itself featured a giant slide that feeds into a horrible looking hydraulic. This thing was massive! Fortunately, there was a narrow brown tongue that just missed the worst of the hole. We all attempted to ride this tongue with varying results. Matt Horton even got some rodeo action in on this beast. I could only watch from afar as he whipped off cart-wheels and loops at warp speed before calmly surfing out of the hole towards to center of the river. Well done!

Dan Rubado: "Hey diddle diddle, right down the middle"

It wasn't far down stream from the slide that we came upon the largest vertical drop on the LK. The falls is very wide and features a plethora of possible lines. Be careful when approaching this drop, it would be very easy to get swept into the falls when boat scouting. Ryan was able to recognize the drop 50 yards upstream and we still had some trouble stopping to scout. The drop is marked by a heavily wooded island that splits to river right down the middle. The easier scout is on the left and requires that you run down the left channel. If you run right of the island (like we did) expect to have some trouble stopping above the horizon line). Everyone had clean lines off the falls, which wasn't a gimmie on this day. If you failed to get your bow up, the uniform hole at the bottom promised to smack you around for awhile.

John fights gravity. And wins!

After the falls, the creek kept boogieing, but everything from this point on was easy to scout from within your boat. There were a few ledges towards the end of the run that could hand out a whipping if you weren't on your toes, but for the most part, the creek just rushes down stream. Right down the middle. Somewhere between the falls and the takeout, the sun actually made an appearance and I think we all took a minute to sit back and appreciate the unique area. Being local to the Willamette Valley, it is certainly a stark change to venture over in the central region of the state. Wide open rolling hills as far as the eye can see! As we arrived at the takeout, we met back up with the group that had put-on before us and there was a general feeling of success. Having knocked off such a rarely run creek at such an abnormally high level left everyone feeling pretty stoked on the day. I'll certainly be back the next time levels spike! Despite my shoulder injury, I still classify the LK mission under "Not at a complete circus", which is an upgrade over recent weeks. Thanks again to Ryan for sitting shotgun on this roller coaster. And Jacob for offering to hikeout with me when I injured my shoulder. Until next time. Nate

video from Emile from that trip

Little Klickitat from Difficult E on Vimeo.

Futuristic kayaking through Jupiter canyon

~600 fpm

~Futuristic kayaking

~the unknown

These thoughts kept Matt and myself driving East as the Creeks we passed kept having less and less water. "Ok, if sundance ditch has less than thirty cfs when we cross over we head back". "What?, its dry? Lets keep going anyway". This was the continual conversation we were having as Matt and I headed towards Pine Creek on the Washington side of the Columbia across from Arlington. We continued on to the put in, passing the most surreal, fantastic view I have ever seen.

We were surprised to see plenty of water for the creek (150-200 cfs). We were stoked and with water as well as a name like Jupiter canyon who wouldn't be? We tried seeing into the canyon for clues as to what we would find, but were turned back. We decided to just put on and if it was full of waterfalls and too steep we would just hike back to the car. To save light we decided to not set bike shuttle and just hitch at the end of the trip. We decided to check the mileage on the trip and guessed five miles by the GPS. I believe it was at this point Matt said "I'll be happy if we make it back to this car by midnight".

We put on at 1:00 and immediately ducked a fence. We then started weaving through brush that never gets cleared out by high water because there is no high water. After a short bit we came to the first section of rapids. These were class three affairs that were super manky and involved sketchy moves around Junipers and brush. We started scouting and running them, until we realized we would make better progress hiking through the cow fields. We decided to hike until we saw worthwhile whitewater in order to make downstream progress. About a half mile later it looked like the creek was runnable. We started running some manky boulder piles with more brush before coming to our first horizon line. We got out to scout and were stoked to find a nice Class five boulder Garden with a double rainbow across the sky :)

(only one rainbow in this photo, sorry Paul Vasquez)

Matt dug the line and went first. The trick was to not get knocked off line by the boulders in the lead in, boof a 4 foot drop angling right and paddle to avoid a sieve all the water was pushing hard into. Then you could turn the corner and hit a sweet but challenging double boof that I was sure would be manky but with the correct boof strokes turned out very clean.

(myself boofing the second part of the only rapid we ran)

This one did turn out to be to manky and we walked it, myself on river right, Matt on river left. We kept walking hoping to find runnable water, but it was all really manky and filled with brush. This portage turned into a mile long hike. Luckily the terrain was the easiest portaging I have ever done.

After hiking for about half an hour, we began to see small gorge walls creep up. We hoped this would mean the bedrock we were hoping for was starting. Matt scouted and said it was a no go, so I kept walking. Matt crossed over to my side and eventually caught up to me during a water break/scout I was having. The ground we were walking on was very odd. It obviously did not see water very often, so was very saturated, lapping it all up. This produced a clay that was sticky and squishy. So our feet would sink into it, then stick to our shoes, making our feet pounds heavier. This was a minor annoyance for me, but when Matt caught up to me, he told me how he barely made it out of the canyon because he was sinking knee deep into this stuff and sliding backwards. He would have to lift his feet out with his hands every step because it was gripping his feet like quicksand!

Myself in the midst of our longest portage.

With that behind us we began hiking another large distance to where the creek became flat, this was a good sign as it was the end of the first gradient section and marked the halfway point. The bad news was it was 3:30 and we had an hour of daylight left...

We put on, ducked another fence, made our way through some sketchy juniper gardens. dealt with some more clas II-III boulder stuff, and came to the second section of gradient. It was unrunnable from the get-go, with steep boulder gardens going through a Juniper Forest. We got excited at one point when we saw some bedrock and a sweet looking III-IV slide, but that had wood blocking the exit. We began a more difficult portage and found ourselves high above the creek looking downstream at large gorge walls. We discussed our plan with only 20 minutes of daylight left, by the time we had our backpack/dragging systems rigged, we had 10 minutes of light left. So we cracked a beer each and watched the sun set, enjoying the moment.

(Enjoying the last of the light, at least the moon is out)

The hike out was pleasant, I was really enjoying myself. The moon gave just enough light to see, the ground was soft so we dragged our boats. The air was also warm and still, this combined with only one short bit of rain, we were really having a great time. We took breaks when we felt like it, sucking it all in. We could hear the John Day dam even though it was miles away. We could see I84, so close, yet so unachievable at the moment. We hiked many miles this way as our perception was toyed with. We almost hike around a "deep, forboding canyon" That turned out to be a small ditch. This same play on our sight happened many times, but each time we took the risk and we would be able to pass through the canyon, always turning out much easier than we had anticipated. Eventually we reached a bluff looking out over the Columbia and took it in once again. We plotted our route down to HWY 14 and began down a chute, hoping we wouldn't get cliffed out during our 1,000 foot descent to the road. We got lucky and before we knew it we were stashing the boats and sticking out our thumbs. We started walking towards the town of Moona (as shown on the GPS), which turned out to be a futuristic, invisible city, so we kept walking. Trying to catch a ride to Roosevelt, 7 miles down the road. After 3 miles we came to a car on the side of the road that had hit a deer. The man let us use our phones to call the people who needed to be called. We left him to wait for a tow truck and kept trudging down the road towards Roosevelt. It was somewhere in here I stopped having fun, we were both getting very sore, our legs were hurting and we had a long way to go. We kept going though and eventually we were there. The only problem is we still had 7 very steep uphill miles to the car...

We knocked on the first door we saw that had lights on, including Christmas lights, they must be in the Christmas spirit right? Wrong. We walked down the street to the final house on the block, also with Christmas lights. This was our last chance on getting a ride so Matt really turned on the charm, scoring us a ride! I honestly don't know if I had it in me to walk the rest of the way. I may have curled up in my drysuit under a bush if this man hadn't been willing to give us a ride. Back to the car, dry clothes, collect the boats and we are on our way home!

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Stats from the trip

Pine Creek...

6.7 miles

max gradient 390 fpm

miles kayaked: less than 1

miles portaged: about 2

miles walked total: 10 1/2

miles walked with kayaks: 3 1/2

hours spent outside after dark: 4 1/2

drops ran: 1

It may have seemed like a bust of a trip in some ways, but while the creek itself wasn't something I'd repeat, I'm not going to forget

this view

this moment

this rapid

or this place

I even enjoyed walking through the cow pastures, don't get to do that on the Little White :)

-Jacob