Thursday, June 17, 2010

43 - 6/17/2010 - Upper Similkameen River


In the morning, we once again got up and headed for Canada. We crossed the border at Midway, which is a very small stop. I don't know if the guard was worried about us or just bored, but he sure asked a lot of questions and seemed to try to be tricky with them. It took us a few hours to get to our destination. On the way, we stopped to look at Spotted Lake, which was something I had been wanting to see.

Spotted Lake

We got to the takeout at around noon and dropped off my rig. We checked out the usual put-in, and decided to see if we could put in higher up. We found an easy access that added a couple of miles of river and a few nice rapids.

Lee had run this section before at higher water, and we expected a couple of rapids to be very hard, but the lower water seemed to have made a big difference. The hardest rapid, which we expected to be a hard class III rapid, actually had a class I line through it. I didn't mean to miss all of the fun stuff, but I ended up just floating through the rapid.

After the run, we looked for a campsite next to the river. The highway made it a little noisy, but it didn't really detract from the experience. We scoured the woods for firewood (not easy - this place was pretty picked-over) and had a nice campfire for the evening.

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