Middle Santiam

After a long, dry October, fall boating season finally got under way with some good November rains. I’m always a little anxious in the fall because I never know when snow is going to block access to the high elevation runs. Since most of the exploratory and obscure stuff I like is at higher elevations, it is always a bit of a rush to try and prioritize which run to do and whether there will be enough water. We had some warm rains the first week of Nov. and I thought it might be a good idea to pull the trigger on an exploratory run I’d looked at earlier in the fall.

One of the main draws for exploring new kayak runs is the places I get to see. The terrain around the Middle Santiam is extremely rugged and beautiful. There has been a lot of logging but I think the essence of the wilderness still exists out there. It is a long way for help if something happens. When I look out on these river canyons I can’t help but wonder what’s down there.

Rugged country

Looking down on the put-in on a fall scouting mission

Last year we did an epic, high water run down Pyramid Cr. which got me wondering what else was in the area. After rafting season I took a couple days to wander around the area and see what was up. My cunning plan was to run the upper section of the Middle Santiam which, in addition to Pyramid Cr., forms the headwaters of the Middle Santiam River. Then, without doing the usual overnight trip, continue down the 14 miles of the Middle Santiam. This plan had the added benefit (we thought) of avoiding the mega-shuttle usually required to run the Middle Santiam. Of course, Jason and I got lost trying to find the take-out that avoids the deadly 6 mile lake paddle at the end of the day. After a few hours of driving around logging roads we finally found our spot, left my car, and headed back up to camp at the put-in.

I knew that the water level was probably not going to be ideal but with rain forecast for Friday night and all day Sat., I was hoping the creek would be rising by the time we got on it in the morning. I optimistically set up a tent and tarp anticipating a downpour before going to bed. Each drip on the tent woke me up thinking, “This is it. It’s going to start raining.” Morning came with clear skies and no rain in sight. We were screwed. The creek actually dropped about 50% overnight which made it ridiculously low rather than just low. No problem, we decided to put on and see how it went. By 8:30am I was dropping into the awesome falls that starts the run.

Who goes first? (James won)

Dropping in

After a fun little rapid below the waterfall and a short portage over a logjam, we started realizing just how little water we actually had in the creek. I was in front when I heard Jon whistle and give the stop signal and I pretty much knew what we were going to do. Hike out. Luckily we made the call to hike out before going much further as the canyon gets pretty remote further downstream. We found a little gully that went all the way up to the road and resigned ourselves to heading back to the cars. I was extremely disappointed but recognized that this was the best decision. In the past we’ve groveled down some extremely low creeks just to say we did it and it ends up being a ton of work and really hard on gear. I’ll definitely be back at some point to try and get it with more water.

Cub Creek

This is a little creek I first looked at years and years ago but never really got around to running it. Cub Cr. is located in the headwaters of the Clackamas River and is slightly bigger than the Clackamas at their confluence. Cub Cr. carves an impressive canyon well away from the road. The canyon is what first peaked my interest. I knew from my previous scout that the run would mainly be Class 3 but would be pretty and maybe worth doing. This run also gets snowed in during the winter so the window of runnability is pretty small.

Heading into the woods at the put-in

After a couple days of rain, almost every river was running really, really high making the boating opportunities few and far between. Rather than just do high water runs down one of the standard runs, Matt and I decided to look for something off the beaten track and came up with Cub Cr. We only settled on Cub Cr. after driving around for most of the day looking at a couple other choices so we didn’t even get to the put-in until about 3pm. I knew we were pushing it for daylight but figured it was a short run and only Class 3 so we could probably pull it off.

After a remarkably wood-free put-in, the portages started to stack up. The wood wasn’t the biggest problem, though. The very healthy shrub population on the sides of the river made things particularly unpleasant. We also always seemed to be on the wrong side of the river for portages. Right about the time I was beginning to worry, things opened up and we hit some pretty fun stretches of continuous Class 3. We were making pretty good time with only the occasional portage or limbo under a log but we were still losing light pretty quickly. 4:35 at one of the portages and I knew we were going to either just get off at dark or be too late. I wasn’t too worried though because we were past the worst of the canyon and figured it wouldn’t be too hard to hike to the road if necessary.

About 15 minutes later we were staring at flat water and multiple log jams. It was an easy call. Hike out. I’d already seen the stretch of river I wanted to see so I was more than willing to hike through the woods before we lost all of our light. Turned out we weren’t very far from the road, the hike was flat and the woods were pleasantly devoid of shrub growth. All of which made the hike very easy.

After a long and somewhat scary moped shuttle in the dark, we loaded up and headed home. All in all, I enjoyed seeing the creek and didn’t think it was all that much work. Not sure if I’ll be back though.

Typical Cub Cr. scenery

Written by peteg - Visit Website

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:47 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.