Crystal Gorge
Well its been far too long that I’ve lived within a couple of hours from this classic and not been over there to experience it’s majesty. There are not enough beautiful descriptive words to explain how this river makes one feel. A day hanging at Beaver Lake would not be a day wasted. Tuesday I got a couple of days off so Jakub and I called everyone we knew to get a third person to head up to the gorge with. Who knew that everyone would call us back and we’d roll through with a crew of 8 solid kayakers!
The flow was medium and great for leap-frogging our way down. Here was me on the first of many awesome boofs as you make your way deeper in.
Jakub Nemec following suit.
Next up was Corkscrew and Pine Tree Falls. When we rolled up on this I knew today was going to be awesome. Corkscrew was an awesome twisty rapid with a great boof at the top.
Pine Tree was just plain sweet!
Here is Chris Baer also clean lines on Pine Tree.
And Mike Cleaning it up.
While most people would think out of a group of 8 at least one person might not be feeling up for the commitment of the inner Gorge. Not this crew, we all fired up Zute and partied the whole way through the inner gorge. What an awesome place. Here is Jakub on one of the many technical drops within.
Somehow I ended up in front routing through the last drops with good luck. It was great to turn back upstream and look through the steep gorge and see the rest of the crew pick it apart and come through. The last drop served up some good smack down with 2 of 8 people swimming. Here is Casey Tango going deep.
The deep line doesn’t go….
The whole crew was so fired up after finishing this awesome run. It was great. Chris Baer, Todd Greenwood, and I got back here on Thursday too. We didn’t even think to check the gage! It had rained all night and we found out later that the flow for our early morning trip was over 400 cfs. The top was very pushy and the inner Gorge was game on! Again the bottom drops dished out some carnage sending Chris’ boat for an un-manned mission off the lower falls! Pictures from the high water trip will be up soon, plus tons of awesome video will be in Driven 3.
