This is a great run to do on a sunny August afternoon when it's 90 degrees and the Cle Elum dam is releasing 3000 or more and the Yakima is adding in a little more. It's not quite as entertaining when it's cold, drizzling, and the Cle Elum dam is releasing 1000 and the Yakima is high and muddy. Still, it was the cleanest I have ever seen the river - usually there is more trouble with logjams in a few places.
There are a couple of places where the Cle Elum is being "engineered". The first "rapid" used to be a simple weir driving water into a channel on the right. It wasn't a lot of water before, but recently someone has engineered a curve in the river using log and dirt mounds. This causes a lot more water to go to the right. Most of this water comes back into the river a couple of miles downstream. Another engineered area is a river bank not far from where the river runs under I-90. There is a very nice house on river left that has a bank that is subject to heavy erosion. They have laid huge logs sloping up the river bank to reduce the erosion. I think they've done a reasonable job, and that it isn't going to cause more problems than it solves, but we'll know that in a few years.
The plan for the rest of the week was to go over to the Methow River. Despite the promise of sunny weather, I decided to back out of the trip at this point. I can run the Methow in June or July on a weekend and not use up any vacation time. It would be more interesting for me to use that vacation time on something that I can't do on a weekend.
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