Into the Outside: December 2025

The most convenient way to run this creek would be to hike up from the Chetco on the Tincup Trail after a short bushwhack, and put in at the confluence with Darling Creek.

That is not this tale.

For many years boaters who look at such things have noticed on maps that during the great bend of the Illinois River, it heads south and gets relatively close to another large Southern Oregon drainage, the Chetco, at a point where both rivers are mature but still have gradient. The way to connect these two drainages is via Tincup Creek.

Map from Northwest Rafting

The route to this adventure could start at the normal put in for the Illinois River.

This would be followed by about 15 miles on the Illinois into the great bend, just shy of Green Wall Rapid.

The route would then leave the river and go 2,000' up a ridge to Tincup Pass, followed by a 1,000' descent to Tincup Creek.

The route would have no trail, but plenty of brush.

Tincup Creek had no documentation or communal knowledge about the whitewater as far as my feelers could reach, so 5-6 miles of exploratory boating on Tincup (up to 200 fpm) would feed into about 11 more miles on the Chetco River. While the obvious difficulties included the steep and poison oak peppered bushwhack over Tincup Pass, and the unknown challenges of Tincup Creek, the more known challenge of paddling both the Illinois River and Chetco at the maximum recommended flows would also play a large role in the obstacles that made this an adventure still uncompleted as of early 2025.

Having floated past Tincup Creek a few times, and watching video clips of others floating past, it was clear the Chetco gauge would need to be running at a healthy flow to make an attempt. In fact the 3,000-5,000 cfs target range would have been considered multiple times the high water limit when I first paddled the Chetco a decade or so ago. To have that much water on the Chetco gauge while paddling Tincup Creek inside a predictable weather window would require starting on the Illinois River at the upper end of recommended levels so that Tincup would drop into a nice flow, but not drop completely out during the two days it took to paddle the Illinois, then hike over the pass.

With had first-hand knowledge about the difficulty of the Tincup Pass hike, packrafts appeared to be the obvious choice for the trip, so the healthy water flows were going to be a real factor and weighed heavy on our minds as we considered making my second attempt of the link-up.

The driving force for this trip was Quinlan Pfiefer AKA "Q". He was hoping for late March, but the weather didn't cooperate, so he threw a dart at the wall and picked some dates in early April immediately before he needed to drive back to Montana. Somehow those were the best 3 days to pick of the entire year, landing after a week of heavy rain and just before another storm rolled in (working on this report months later, another good window did not open, we had one shot and took it).