When we did the first paddle raft descent in the early 90's at 1500 Nut was the one that got our attention. It's pretty easy to sneak on the right, but man, a couple of those holes are spooky, especially when we didnt even have a kayaker to follow. After that, the rest wasn't so bad. I know teams of guides paddle raft it these days and it's damn fun way to tackle the beast. Like most first timers, we ran the bottom 5 first to make sure it was possible, and it was.
Thanks for sharing. Totally agree about Nut. Looking upstream at it from the put-in was very intimidating. I'm looking forward to getting back to Banks and getting to run more of this amazing river, but I imagine it will be a long time before I feel ready to take on Nut, if ever.
I was watching some vids on people kayaking a river in Texas called the Devils River and they would comment on the rapids and I kept thinking what? Those aren’t rapids haha. I’m not a kayaker but I’m an Oregonian and I smugly watched this video with pride cause THESE are rapids. 😂❤👍
Dope Butcher’s Block line! That one’s tricky to nail. Glad R line at Elbow Room worked out, and I appreciate you sharing the details. You made it look good, though I’m sure that was spooky, esp since it was unintentional. That massive center sieve is no joke!
Thanks, Kevin. Not sure how I got that line at Butcher's, but it worked out really well. Elbow Room was definitely spooky! Walked it when I went back a few weeks ago.
I'm sure most of you will notice how terribly my line at Elbow Room went. After having decided to run the drop, as I was getting into my boat, I became unsure of my marker indicating where to enter the drop. I got back out of my boat and stood up to get a point of reference. I saw what I thought was the marker I had picked, calibrated, and started to get back in my boat. However, at river level, I mistook the marker that I had picked while scouting from above for another marker a couple feet to the right. As I headed toward the lip of the drop I realized I was off my line, but it was far too late to stop. I came off the drop WAAAAY further right than I should have been and directly next to a rock which blocked me from immediately trying to get back to the left. After passing the rock and making one quick attempt to head left that was rejected by a hole, I decided I wasn't going to make it and needed to start working on my contingency plan. I paddled as hard as I could to get as far right as possible within the right channel to avoid the siv. Fortunately, this plan worked and I made my way cleanly down the far right side of the right channel, maintaining enough distance from the siv. I'm very happy, and extremely lucky, to have made it through the drop without incident, but am also disappointed to have misjudged my line and to have put myself in such a risky situation. I like to think that I'm able to make sound and measured decisions while kayaking, but when I got to the bottom of the drop I no longer felt good about the choice I had made. Despite my confidence in being able to run the drop in the way it should be run, it turns out I was not okay with the consequences of a mistake, which is something I should have been, and need to be, able to determine before running the drop. This experience was extremely humbling and its memory will stick with me for a long time, which I'm ultimately grateful for. I think being mindful of this experience while kayaking in the future will help to more accurately balance my decisions and take stock of not only the risk associated with specific rapids, but the reality of those risks as well. Even if I feel 95% confident in my abilities, I need to have a clear and firm idea of the outcome should something go wrong, because 5% is a small number, but it's not 0%. I have included the footage of Elbow Room in the video. Although I think most know this, I want to make it clear that, although my line might look pretty clean if you haven't seen the rapid before, there is inherent danger in taking the right channel at Elbow Room and the drop should only be run through the left channel or portaged.
Thanks, Brooks. On this particular day I was feeling pretty tired from paddling the day before, so was feeling pretty good about getting out at Big Bro.
The log @ 4:58 would definitely be an issue at any lower flow. I thought there was 1 other one in play that was diagonal downstream to the left with the top just right of center, but most of the water going into/under it that was after then. Not sure if you edited that out, or the camera wasn't working, or if I just don't remember it right
I didn't really edit out any of the river below the last bridge and the start of the bigger water. I'm thinking that the log you might be thinking of is in the lead-in to Willard's. There was a log that I remember seeing that I think matches that description, but I don't have footage to confirm.
Holy Crap -- Wow! My boating days are long gone, but with your videos, I not only get to relive them, but go beyond into waters I never would have boated. Thanks so much Andy for posting!!!
@@andylozovoy8367that is indeed a dying art in this era of video scouting. I recall exploring this run for a couple seasons when it was unusually free of wood in the mid 2000s. I found 4' to 4'1" on the MB guage to be ideal flows. The move at the dam structure went well on the right. Then there was a really steep drop called Simon Says that we ran on the right where the line threaded the needle between two manky rocks in the landing zone. All the recent videos show people running that drop around on the left, which looks cleaner than what I remember, but the rocks forming the drop might have moved and changed the line. Willard Falls was always big clean fun, but then it and some of the upstream drops became blocked by large wood hazards so I stopped running this section. Anyway, great to see you guys getting on it, and thanks for sharing the video. It's a fantastic option when the lower LW is too high for comfort.
@@bfosterkayaking Yeah, the drop at the hatchery structure looked good to go on the right, but we didn't want to risk being washed into Simon Says if anything went wrong. There is currently a large log blocking the majority of the right side of Simon Says @11:06; so, the left line, which didn't look good to us at our flow, appears to be your only option right now. After scouting a route, we were able to portage on river right without issue and get back in just downstream of the log. Although I'm personally very glad that we didn't have more water for our first lap, I imagine 4.0' would be a really great flow for this run and a little bit cleaner. That being said, even though there were one or two spots that were a little manky, 3.8' didn't feel too low to me by any means.
