Cody on the Methow
Despite the fact that my friends do this run every year, this was my first run on the Methow. I didn't know what to expect. I had the impression that it was a big water river like the Wenatchee, and that it had one really hard rapid, known as the Black Canyon. On the way down to the takeout, we scouted this rapid and another big rapid below it. They both looked big, but not difficult to deal with. The flow was average for this run, about 6100 cfs.
The run started out easy enough. The rapids were mostly just big wave trains without many distinctive features. When we came to the Black Canyon, we were all a little nervous, but everyone made it through without any problems. There was a slightly tricky entrance, but below that there was plenty of room to maneuver.
The next big rapid was Staircase, which Lee described as being like Snowblind on the Wenatchee. For some reason, most of us went right, but there is a nice clean route right down the middle. Below this was our lunch stop.
After a couple more rapids, we came to the second one we had scouted. This was a giant minefield of holes leading into a hard left turn with several huge waves and holes on the outside. The preferred run was to start right and then move left in the turn. All but one of us made the move - one swimmer got bumped out of his boat and had to try a few times to get back in, but was fine. The rest of the run was just splashy wave trains.
After the shuttle, we headed up to a free campground nearby. There was nobody else around, so we had our pick of campsites. That should have meant spending time finding the best site, but we really just took the first partly shady one we came to. A few minutes after we started setting up camp, someone noticed a better camp across the road, next to a creek. I checked it out and decided it was worth moving. The camp was a little trashy from the previous tenants, but with a little work it was fine.
Up to this point, I haven't really talked much about the weather. Before this day, we had cloudy days and a couple of drizzly days, but this day was sunny and hot. When we got to camp, it was around 80 degrees. This would turn out to be important later on...
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