Canyoneering in the Alps

I was a bit uneasy clipping into a rope with no belay device, but it had worked for the two guys in front of me, so I took one last look at the bolted anchor, sent a trusting glance to Ian, the guide, and let him lower me off the edge.

This was my first taste of canyoneering, or “canyoning” as they succinctly say, in Europe. Of course I’d have been lowering myself, much to my satisfaction, if it weren’t a guided trip, but surrendering to the established program was a part of the exercise. I wanted to see how they do it in the Alps, birthplace of nearly every alpine sport, including this one. Thanks to my friend Riaan at Outdoor Interlaken, I got a first hand glimpse.

The gorge was granite, not too different than some of the southern Arizona gorges I describe in Canyoneering Arizona. Being in the Alps, however, the Grimsel Gorge was a whole different flavor. One of our first mandatory jumps came at a greasy smooth 15-footer. While I downclimbed to make an awkward 8-foot leap, the rest of the gang scrambled up to a stone and concrete jumping platform above for a 25-footer! I think they got their money’s worth on this one.

At the next drop, a fixed line protected a slippery traverse, and iron bars aided the downclimb. I was starting to get the idea. In a land of James Bond sky trams and paragliding landing zones in the middle of downtown, there’s no reason one shouldn’t expect to see the canyons fully developed for adventure recreation too, and this one was.

At the crux, a 15-foot waterfall was pinched in lovely sheer walled narrows. Back home, it would’ve been a webbing anchor through a pinch point, and a slimy short rappel into a swim. As I sized up the scene, however, it was apparent that an Alp style descent was in store. “Hold on here, and let go when I shout,” were my instructions. And I was off, zinging down a cable zip line over the middle of a pool before letting go, and dropping like a stone into the depths. It was hardly the measured progress amidst wilderness isolation that I find in the canyons of the American Southwest, but I have to admit, it was one hell of a lot of fun.

Corsica Kayak Session Festival 2011

As I blissfully paddled past the portage eddy, a chorus of warning shouts called after me in several languages; German, French, English. I didn’t understand many of the words, but I got the point—eddy out dude! The unrunnable falls were just ahead, and I was apparently headed for certain doom. I pulled ashore quickly and climbed onto smooth grey granite, much to the relief of my impromptu international safety committee. Kayaking, it seems, is an international language, and nowhere was the camaraderie more apparent than at Kayak Session magazine’s Corsica Festival, 2011.

 Creek-boat laden vehicles rolled in over the weekend, turning the quiet Ernella Campground into a bustling menagerie of paddlers’ camps that sprawled across grassy fields beside the crystal clear Tavignano River. According to my unofficial survey, kayakers checked in from the U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Italy, and the U.S.A. Evenings were noticeably quiet early in the week as paddlers returned slightly battered from low water descents. Still, boaters have been flocking to classics like the Fium Orbu and Travo, where bedrock slides provide good fun even at 80 cfs! And the sunny Corsican landscape—filled with vineyards and quaint villages beneath snowy peaks—was a joy to experience in any case, low water or not.

Several of whitewater’s keystones made a point to stop by the mountain isle. Horst Fursatel of the hf brand attended, global paddler Arnd Schaeftlein and his Teva van were camped out accommodating paddling missions all week, and the human Corsica guidebook Raphael Thiebaut patiently answered everyone’s questions as to where the highest water might flow. Snowboard champion-turned-kayak pro Ron Fischer came in straight from Chile, and Frenchman Stephane Pion paddled each day before showing the latest paddling films each night.

Full-time paddlers and weekend warriors alike enjoyed the scene, low water or not. Perfect water levels are only a bonus to this perfect Corsican setting.

Canyon kayaking beneath Arizona’s steppes

“Rock! Rock! Rock!” Mike yelled as a three-hundred-pound sandstone block crashed down the cliff below us. Lisa was down there, somewhere. I joined his warning chorus, but remained too occupied dangling a tethered kayak off the edge to recognize the situation immediately. By the time I made sense of what had just happened, it was all over. The last of the rockslide echoed from the bottom of the canyon, and Lisa shouted a welcome “I’m okay.” It wasn’t your typical put-in for a class III day run.

Yet very little is typical when kayaking near Winslow, Arizona. The landscape is Kansas-flat wind-swept steppe. Distant mesas of the Hopi lands break the monotony somewhat, but not exactly in a verdant water world kind of way. When Jackson Browne wrote about a guy standing on the corner here, he definitely didn’t have a whitewater boat on his shoulder.

Pothole en route to put-in

But oh what the desert hides! Hidden beneath this high desert are narrow gorges, and for a brief time each spring, the slots carry snowmelt from the Mogollon Plateau. The runoff snakes between the walls, creating mazes of incongruous, tumbling whitewater. Accessing the water can be a tricky task, ensconsed between vertical cliffs as it is, hence the rockfall and dangling boats.

Once below the put-in cliff, we walked a quarter-mile to the water, where I once spooked a family of drinking javelina. Trapped, the wild desert pigs made a dash past with only feet to spare in the confined canyon. Today it was we humans who were nearly trapped, thanks to a giant pothole in the canyon that had formed with the last flash flood. With another round of rope-lowered boats and an unprotected 5.4 traverse, we were finally ready to go boating!

Winslow paddling

Although I provided overview descriptions, neither of the Winslow area creeks made it into my Paddling Arizona book as complete entries. The access is just too funky. No matter how you slice it, finding the river is just part of the adventure when exploring the whitewater Mecca of Winslow, Arizona.

They call it God's Pocket

World record! Longest Oak Creek shuttle

We had no intention of setting a record on Oak Creek. And it’s not the type of title we want to repeat, either—longest shuttle ever. The much-anticipated storm over Presidents Day weekend brought the creek up, and the roads down. Highway 89A, our standard twenty-minute access to the creek, was closed and gated, prompting the more logical among us to shelve paddling plans for the day and go skiing, bake cookies, sit by the fire. But we had boats loaded and the storm seemed to be clearing, so onward we went, to the crowded Interstate 17 for a roundabout drive to the creek.

The river was fantastic, a bit lower than optimum but more scenic than usual. Trees along the creek were snow-covered in a lacy white dust, and red rock monuments of the canyon soared snow-draped through a misty atmosphere. Despite occasional squalls I remained toasty warm in my Kokatat drysuit. Take-out came too soon.

Sun dappled pillars and breaks of blue made it difficult to believe that the storm was still raging along the rim, but the canyon highway remained closed. So too, we soon learned, was the interstate. The proverbial jack-knifed semi-truck was apparently the culprit, prompting two-hundred cars to park patiently at the freeway on-ramp, the line growing by the second.

Thank goodness for back roads. We bounced across the Verde Valley on a familiar dirt byway, enjoying the stormy scenery but heading steadily opposite our destination, for the moment. Driving up the Mogollon Rim, the snow returned. Trailing a cloud of white dust, we passed just one other truck in our second hour, and were on pace to get home by dark until reaching the scene of a plow being extricated from the deep.

Finally turning onto lighted streets near home, a familiar pick-up with boats in the back appeared in the headlights. It was John and Josh, the other paddling party that had run the creek. Apparently they had endured the wait at the freeway—different tactics, same results. We burned more gas, sure, but hey, we got the record!

 

Big tree paddling in the redwoods

We stepped off the trail into a wall of shoulder-high sword fern, letting the rainforest swallow us. A vague path, barely discernible, lead deeper into the copse. Feeling our way over a rotten log, the route opened at the edge of a swamp. Soaring redwoods were all around. “This is it,” I thought to myself as Lisa clawed her way ahead. Moments later, there it was, the tree, the great tree.

The trunk was a wall of wood, broader than what we think of, when we think of trees, even redwood trees. We were boggled, and we hadn’t seen the half of it. Looking up, the architectural complexity of the giant unfolded as massive arms emerged at one-hundred-and-fifty feet. One swept downward for half that distance, and then re-sprouted as an entirely new tree, a big tree, big enough to reign supreme in most forests. This sub-tree grew straight for the sky, topping out at well over two-hundred-feet, still a ways short of the main crown. I lay below the titan, tapping a tangible energy.

I had seen the great tree two weeks earlier, while doing research for my latest book project—Big Tree Hikes in Redwood Country. At the time, my partner and I were suffering from big-tree fatigue following several days of hiking in the old growth, not too dissimilar a situation from the much-publicized “discovery” of the grove featured in Preston’s The Wild Trees. When I spotted the leviathan from a distance, I noted it as exceptional, and kept moving. But something drew me back, even from the damp seat of my kayak.

Paddling through forests of big trees fills a quirky niche in the world of paddling, and floating in the world’s tallest is the logical extreme of that pursuit. Mill Creek in Jedediah Smith Park is one of four boatable streams that flow through un-cut redwoods, and for sheer proximity to the most remarkable trees, it is arguably the best.

The whitewater is negligible, although class II gravel bars, occasional strainers, and shallow water limits the type of boat that could make the run. With a steep slimy put-in, and a quarter-mile carry at the take-out, the run seemed suited for our kayaks. We launched at the Howland Hill Road bridge, and paddled to the cold green waters of the Smith River before taking out.

After making our side hike to the great tree, we might have been sensory overloaded, but the magic of flowing water soothed away any big tree hangover, and we glided easily through forest primeval. A thirty-inch steelhead eddied quietly behind a rock as I floated past. A hard-flying hawk landed confidently on an overhanging maple, and we drifted below.

At the big river, we picked through a web of alders to reach a small beach, and hoisted our boats for a walk past the Stout Tree, a remarkable specimen in a grove of ancients. Reaching the top of a hill, plastic came crashing to pavement with relief. Before starting to jog the shuttle, I took a moment. My own steam mingled with that of the cool misty forest. These woods had left their mark on me, yet one more amazing landscape that paddling has allowed me to enter.

Whitewater follies on California’s Smith River

A madrone trunk looms over the obscuring forests of the Smith

Any whitewater paddler who drives Highway 199 along the Smith River knows the spot. The sinuous green Middle Smith suddenly vanishes, replaced by a tiny creek just before the road enters Oregon. Where did the river go? Somewhere into the steep cloaked mountains, apparently, obscured from view by a narrow canyon and a confusing matrix of mountainous geography.

Unveiling the mystery of the disappearing Smith was hardly our intent as my wife, Lisa, and I sought a late afternoon put-in on the roadside river. She was fresh off the plane in Medford and I was fresh off the couch. A quick warm-up run would suffice. But after dodging poison oak in a vain search for a put-in, the little creek along the highway—Griffin Creek, we would learn—seemed a good access. The shallow stream would surely join the Middle Smith in a quarter-mile, right?

Three minutes below the bridge, we looked at one another from our respective eddies with quizzical expressions, that unspoken kayakers’ communication that says, “Hmm, I don’t really see a line, do you?” Fortunately, she did, and bombed over the unexpected horizon with hardly a hesitation. I followed, elated at the bonus whitewater we had stumbled into on our “access creek” of 80 cfs. More drops followed. We read and ran. A gorge formed around us. We portaged a log-slide rapid. Crawling into my boat on slimy rocks, with a real rapid beside me and an un-climbable gorge below, it struck me that Griffin Creek had exceeded “warm up run” status.

Although I hesitate to call the small stream class V, I was definitely in class V mode. There was the on-the-fly paddle signal to stop as I careened into a last-chance eddy, followed by an ultra sketchy scout, followed by a roped-boat ferry, followed by a scramble upstream and a swim to the portageable side of the creek. Next came the one-handed sprayskirt application attempt while balancing on a ledge and bracing with the paddle. That didn’t work. I finally got the skirt on while spinning in a swirly eddy precariously close to a hole, but not before gallons of cold Griffin Creek water sloshed into the cockpit with me. I peeled out wobbily, and relied on Lisa’s grab to secure the next eddy. Below was only more of the same—a long rapid, a ninety-degree bend, a log smack in the channel, a last chance eddy—we scanned upward for the promise of Highway 199.

Three pitches of near-vertical boat hauling had us off belay and at the guardrail in gathering dusk. I stripped off a now-filthy drysuit, repacked a muddied throwrope, and started the long jog back to the truck. It took all of five minutes. I guess we hadn’t gone as far as it seemed. It occurred to me then that maybe nobody had ever run Griffin Creek before. Why would they, in a region rich with real rivers? Even if by some small chance our afternoon debacle was a first descent, the Middle Smith’s emergence from the mountains remains a mystery, to me at least, and I kind of like it that way.

 

 

Arizona Summits North research

Guidebook writing is more than just going for a hike and jotting it down. This fact was made clear recently when I sat down to enter a description for Hualapai Peak in my forthcoming guidebook,
 Arizona Summits North. Where were my notes? Nowhere, apparently, so there was only one professional solution—go do it again.

It was a gorgeous day in northwestern Arizona’s Hualapai Mountains, blue skies and just a light cover of snow above 7,000 feet. The summit route was considerably more convoluted than I remembered. I wrote it all down in a bound notebook this time, and promptly entered my findings into the developing book upon my return home. Look for the details in Arizona Summits North, due out in the spring. For now I’ll just offer this teaser: The view from the top of the Hualapai Peak is vast, and stunning, stretching from the Spring Mountains near Las Vegas to the Kofa Range, near Mexico.

Grand Canyon canyoneering

 

The original plan had us hiking into the Canyon under a full moon, but as we donned headlamps in the shelter of Eric’s truck, the night outside was black as coal. There wasn’t a moon in sight, and a steady mist had me wondering just how wet I’d get beneath my high-tech shell—a twenty-year-old wool sweater.

This was my first expedition with Eric Leifer’s Delving Deeper project, which proposes to explore the innumerable canyoneering possibilities within the greatest gorge of them all—Grand Canyon. His latest escapade took us (Eric Leifer, Dylan Ross, TW, Angie Fuhrman, and John Govi) to the upper forks of Deer Creek.

We made it to the Esplanade level two-thousand-feet below with the aid of our lights, and my trusty ski sweater kept me warm if not dry, but the patter of raindrops persisted through the night. In the morning, clouds draped over the North Rim. There wouldn’t be any canyoneering swims through cold pools today. Fortunately, we had recently gained information on the East Fork of Deer Creek, indicating that the swim potential in that fork was minimal. In fact, adventure photographer Bill Hatcher had ascended the canyon in 2007, an impressive feat as we would soon discover.

A trickle of running water from the recent rain coursed down the creekbed. We boulder-hopped along, making good progress until reaching a large cliff in the red Supai Formation. A short downclimb followed by a traverse and a long descent on loose rain lubricated slopes had us at the Redwall Limestone, the layer that promised the most technical difficulty of the route.

Our first rappel came at a choke-stone that Hatcher had detailed in his report. A dozen feet on rope delivered us to a polished limestone narrows. I lingered, taking pictures while Govi probed downstream. “It looks like we’re gonna be swimming,” he called from below, to our collective chagrin. It was deep, but short. We moved quickly downstream to a patch of sunshine—the first of the day. By the time lunch was over, we had nearly forgotten the chill of the water.

It would be our last swim, but not our last rappel. That came in the lower Redwall, where the creekbed plunged over a 140’ drop. Dour grey walls overlapped in folding patterns as we gazed downstream, wondering what was next. We all made it down safely and the rope pulled cleanly. It was only then that we speculated on how Bill Hatcher had managed to climb up this spot. A crack here, a stem there, one terribly exposed ledge crawl…I could see how it was possible, but I was glad to be going downstream, with a rope.

It was several more hours of down climbing, boulder hopping, cobble walking, willow crawling, and scree-field tip-toeing before we reached the confluence of the main stem of Deer Creek, and made camp. A week of showery weather had made the desert soil into a soft green mat perfect for relaxing, even if your sleeping pad consisted of a lumpy wetsuit like Leifer’s.

There was one last pitch of steep boulders to negotiate before we reached the gushing springs that produce the perennial water of Deer Creek. We tanked up, and began the march uphill. Now the clouds were welcomed. Late in the day, weak sunshine penetrated, giving trademark glow to the expansive slickrock of the Esplanade. A chill wind blew through auburn oak leaves on the rim, where my wife Lisa, fresh off her own wanderings, waited with cold beers and salty chips as we ended like we began, in the dark.

 

Agua Fria Flash Flood Kayaking, Arizona

The Agua Fria River, in my humble opinion, is the best one-day run in Arizona. I’ve said as much in Paddling Arizona, and often questioned the claim. Yet the Agua always delivers. When tornado inducing thunderstorms raked the area on October 6th, the river came up, according to the usgs gages. Jesse Perry, Jonothan Olsen, and I made it to the Badger Springs put-in by 11 am, only to find a measley 8 cfs in the creek! Just as we schemed a plan B, Jesse exclaimed, “It’s coming up.” Thirty minutes later we were launching on a robust 250 cfs.