Salmon River Gorge; SRG

Beta

Stream:   This is one of the better adventures in Oregon.  Oregon Kayaking has a good history of the run that makes for interesting reading.

Exploring the Salmon River Canyon prior to the first descent

Salmon Canyon, fourth known descent

Salmon Canyon; First no portage descent

Salmon Canyon; Complete Guide


It is well described there, so I'll keep my info concise.

Either hike up from the bottom six miles or run shuttle and hike two miles.  The two times I ran SRG I did the shuttle.  The ideal situation is the shuttle with a shuttler driver.

Either way, hike to the meadow at this location and traverse the bottom of a small cliff to pick up a faint trail down the ridge-line to the stream.  The first drop is Split Falls and is the most straight forward drop on the run.  It's a fun and stress-free drop.

Portage the next small boulder garden on the left (though it has been run), then catch the next available eddy on the right for a seal launch portage.  Below the seal launch there is a fair bit of class II until you arrive at Little Niagara.  Scout on the right, run center finishing left with a strong boof to avoid a shelf in the center and a cave behind the drop on the left.

Just downstream is Vanishing Falls, which gets portaged more often than ran.  Usually via a throw and go on the right, make sure you jump past the shelf into the deep water in the middle of the channel.  Be organized here as just downstream is a sticky ledge you don't want gear or people floating into.

Matt King has a good line off Vanishing Falls

Scout the exit ledge on the right, it's a sticky hole and the safety situation isn't perfect.  However if you are right and keep your nose up it's pretty easy to clear the hole.  I haven't heard of anyone having issues here even though it's scary looking.

A short bit of easy floating and a couple small ledges lead you to a narrow and beautiful hallway leading up to Frustration Falls.  What an incredible place.

Scout the first tier of Frustration in the middle if the log bridge is still there, it falls off to the left harder than it might appear.  If flows are good its a great boof.  The channel on the left just below the landing zone exits via a nasty sieve, don't go over there.

Scout the second and third tier's from the right side, usually done before running the first tier but not always.  The second tier has a reputation of being weird and hard to run well, so some people seal launch in right above the final 30-40' drop.   The wall downstream is undercut, but no one has run into trouble there yet.

Looking over the lip of the final drop in Frustration.

Exiting this pool is the limiting flow factor on the run.  The far left channel lands in the narrow exit to the pool.  It can be a challenging fight at normal flows, and impossible at high flows.

It is possible to portage Frustration Falls on the right.

Next up is a twenty footer usually run leftish.  Then catch an eddy on the right to deal with Final Falls.  There is a tiny tree some people repel off of, or you can jump.  People jumping from the repel point have hit bottom before, so I like to walk down to a small perch closer to the falls and jump into the boil at its base.

Matt takes the jump from the small perch.  

Final Falls has been run a few times, here is a video showing  lines.

Flows:  Flows are tricky on this one, they are visual but people who haven't done the run don't really know what they are looking for.  From the take out bridge, it should look barely floatable. There used to be a rock that people looked at, but the streambed changes yearly so that is now outdated.  If it looks like healthy flows you won't be able to escape the pool below Frustration and the Vanishing Falls portage would get sketchy.  Hopefully someone figures out a better visual metric in the future.

To decide if it's even worth taking a look, you can use the Sandy River @ Marmot gauge.  If there is a visible diurnal, look for between 500-1,000 cfs.  800 is good, 500 is really low.

If there is no visible diurnal, look for between 1,000-1,500 cfs.

July 4th, 2009 was a pretty standard flow for the run.

Access:   Take Hwy 26 towards Mt. Hood, just passed the town of Welches turn right onto E Salmon River Rd next to a Subway.  Follow this 6.7 miles until it crosses the Salmon River.  This is the take out and where you assess the water level.  To hike up, follow the trail up on river right for 6 miles to this  45.2302, -121.8725  meadow.  Enter the meadow, veer right and traverse around a small cliff band.  Then follow a faint trail down the ridge line to the stream.

To do the vehicle shuttle return to Hwy 26 and head towards Government Camp.  Just shy of 23 miles turn right onto NF-42/Oregon Skyline Road.  1.1 miles later turn right on to NF 4290.  2.5 miles later turn left onto NF-2660. In 0.9 miles, this becomes NF-58/Abbott Rd as you stay right. Stay right again in 0.6 miles onto NF-240. At a split 2.1 miles later stay right on 240. In a half-mile stay left at another split in the road (this road is small and is becoming overgrown), follow this road to it's terminus near Linney Creek Campground.  There is a trail taking off from the end of the road, it quickly crosses the Salmon, then about 2 miles into the hike (you will be able to hear Stien Falls when you are getting close) is this 45.2302, -121.8725  meadow on your left.  Enter the meadow, veer right and traverse around a small cliff band.  Then follow a faint trail down the ridge line to the stream.

The trail into Split Falls.

The Linney Creek road is on the bottom right of the map.

It should be noted that in 2015 the road down to Linney Creek campground was blocked by down logs, it is possible this road is in the process of being decommissioned.  

Notes:  Recently Andrew Morrissey opened up a new center line (4:05) on Frustration.  The landing is shallow here, but he found a way to get it done.

Some other trips into the Salmon River Canyon from the Into the Outside team.

From Matt

A raft descent

Canoe and Kayak article

Oregon Field Guide

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

Kalama Falls

Our exploratory trip today didn't pan out due to low water, but Matt made the best of the day by firing up the 40 footer on the main river. Low water made the lip very tricky, but he pulled off a great line.

(photo: Ty)

-Jacob