To paraphrase Hannibal from the A-Team: I hate it when a plan falls apart.
Every spring, I do a big trip with a great group of people. This year, we had planned to run either the Owyhee in Oregon or the Smith in Montana. We were leaning towards the Owyhee, but the flow came up too high, and then the flow came up too high on the Smith. We tried to salvage the trip by planning to run day trips, though I wasn't quite up on the plan, so I still prepared for multi-day trips.
We drove down to the Lower Cispus as a jumping off point. This is a very easy run, but it's good to take advantage of it when it's flowing well and when the gate is unlocked. We had one little bit of adventure on the run above the rapid called Lion's Jaw. In the past when I've done this run, there was a huge hole on the right that always had a tree stuck in it. This time, I was in my big cataraft and the hole was clear, so I decided to run it. It was big, but I went right through. The cataraft behind me went to the right and avoided the hole. The IK behind him decided to try my line... and flipped... and then ended up swimming the left side of Lion's Jaw holding onto a rescue boat. I ran the right side of Lion's Jaw, which is the biggest rapid on the run, and had a fun ride.
As we finished the run, the rain started, and it really came down on us. We got the boats loaded and headed to camp. It took a couple of hours to get camp set up in the pouring rain, and we had dinner after dark. In the morning, it was still raining hard. For that and other reasons, we changed our plans. We headed back to our home area and planned to regroup on Monday...
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