This morning we woke up early and paddled the three miles below some dam on the Hood River and took out in town. We like to think that we did the post-flood first decent of this mighty stretch of river. We heard someone did the run later in the day, and we’re stoked to have beaten them. First D, baby!

The flow was about 2500 cfs and the river was a muddy brown. We were all impressed by the continuous nature of the run and the fun rapids. We thought the river was Class III, but very continuous at these flows so near Class IV.

There was a sketchy part near the end where the sediment had filled in the riverbed below a railroad bridge. Just above this railroad bridge is a rapid that runs up against a wall on the left bank. Below here, the river has a weird feel to it and it funnels down towards a railroad bridge. It was tough to eddy out above the bridge on the right and it would have been scary to run under it. Luckily we all were able to get out and portage on the right hand bank.

The drive from the take-out to Adam and Hata’s place was clocked at four minutes which made us all extremely happy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 2:57 pm and is filed under raft, kayak. 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.