Upper Salmon River
Saturday, March 20, 2004
route:
length: 12.0km, 1 day
difficulty: novice
organizer: Chris Mack
participants: Chris Mack, Keith Nunn, Nicole Mack, Tim Ulrick, Gerry Ross
offsite report: http://vvcc.canoeontario.ca/gallery/salmon1
OR try the Wayback Machine
report:
Another snowy run (is it me?). The bakery was closed so we met at the tea house a few doors down.
Upon arriving at the put-in we discovered quite a lot of ice and so started up the shoreline looking for some open water. We found it at a dock about 1/2km away. I confess I was feeling like this was a stupid idea, but I got talked into it.
The run was great fun. Most of us walked the class IIIs (as described in the link at the bottom) today:
- the first was really shallow (we probably would have been fine if we hadn't looked first)
- the second was a long, cool chute, but had nasty ice undercuts on each side that would have made for a very unpleasant experience (no one in our group ran this, but it looked like the yakkers ahead of us did)
- the third was a falls, and could have been run down the left without too much trouble, but that side was cut off by overhanging ice. Gerry took a line just to the right of the centre rooster tail and did fine
There was lots of other rapid action on the way down, but it all sort of blurs as it was just boat scouting.
All in all, a good day, although getting out of your boat onto ice sheets is easier said than done, especially if you're in a kayak.
It was especially nice to paddle with Nicole again. Hopefully there will be more opportunities for river-running now that she's not consumed by freestyle .
A pretty good route description is here:
http://www.geocities.com/glennw89/Outdoors/upsalmon.htm |
