I don’t even remember the first time I scouted this section of the Zig Zag River. I know I ran the section in the guidebook 7 or 8 years ago and wasn’t that impressed. Some wood and trashy rapids and then Class 2-2+. This upper section has a much more continuous gradient and promised to be a bit more exciting.

But, after some initial scouting I didn’t see all that much that really called out to me so I put it on the back burner and moved on to other adventures. My friend Trev has just started to get into some exploring and surprisingly enough, our long slog on Little SF Kilchis hadn’t deterred him from looking at other stuff. After a couple scouts of Upper Zig Zag he started talking about doing a run. I wasn’t all that excited but, after spending all day doing taxes, the thought of getting on a river, any river, was very appealing. We met up after work and headed up Mt. Hood to Upper Zig Zag.

View from the Put-in

The put-in for Upper Zig Zag is about 2000ft. and the weather report was calling for snow of all things. We’ve had a crazy winter out here in Oregon so I just had to laugh to myself when it started to hail on the way up the highway. A quick change by the highway and we were off to try and find a put-in. We didn’t know exactly where we were going to start but I thought we might as well try to put-in as close to the top as possible. For the sake of completeness, I guess. A short hike through the snow got us to a very small and very woody river so we immediately decided to try lower down. After a short hike through the backyards of some cabins the river looked marginal do-able so we decided to give it a try. We put-in right below a log jam and crossed our fingers that there wouldn’t be too much more of that.

Of course my hands were so cold at this point I really couldn’t cross any fingers. Just downstream was a log that I thought I could get under so I kept going while Trev stopped to watch. I made it under the first log and then ended up with a second log across my lap. Not good! I was able to extract myself and get to shore for the first portage. The creek was so low that it was pretty easy to stand up and walk out of any situation so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Immediately below this log was a nice rapid that showed the potential of the run if you had more water. Of course, shortly below this rapid was another short log portage. Just after crossing under the highway things seemed to pick up a bit with a nice long rapid. After this Trev got out to scout a log-dam which looked runnable to me but the runnable side forced you to run the next rapid with a log in it. Trev was nice enough to move some logs in the log-dam and then moved the log in the next drop so that I could stay in my boat and run both drops. What a boating partner!

Trev in the rapid below the log-dam

Shortly downstream Camp Creek entered and our flow doubled making things more fun. I came into a log a little fast and did an unintentional roll underneath it which was pretty exciting. Trev wisely came in a little slower and didn’t have any problems. From here it was a fun ride down to the take-out with some pretty nice, continuous rapids.

All in all, I’m glad I finally got on a boat on this section. If it had a lot more water and less wood, I’m sure I’d be back again. As it is, it will probably be awhile before I find myself on this one again.

Not bad for exploratory boating

Written by peteg - Visit Website

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Kayaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.