This is the closest whitewater to home. I used to run this all the time - as many as 10 times a year, often solo - but there are so many good choices that this one tends to get forgotten. These days, I run it more often as a high-water alternative to the Middle Middle. This time, I did the run with my next door neighbor, who is almost 80. At the put-in, a 3 year old boy decided to hop into my boat for a ride. I talked with his mother while we got ready to go, and then he thanked me and we left.
The top part of the run has a lot of wood in it because of the flooding in January. We didn't need to portage, but there were some critical choices, and the wrong choices would have led to portages. It really helped to be so familiar with the run and its history. There are sections on this river that have changed drastically over the last 10 years, but a lot of the changes are predictable. Even with this, it was still a fun run as it always is.
One of the interesting things on this run is a huge old-growth cedar stump with a couple of new cedars growing out of it. Until 2003, this stump was on the left bank of the river. During the high water in October 2003, the channel moved left and the stump was on an island. After another year, the stump was all that was left of the island. The November 2006 flood ripped this stump up and pushed it about a half mile downstream where it got stuck at the upstream end of a huge rock (the rock is about 20 feet tall out of the river). Even with all of the flooding in 2008 and 2009, this stump is still jammed up against this rock. It will probably stay there for a few more years, but the trees growing on it are eventually going to rip the stump apart and there is no place for them to go but downstream.
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