Henry Mountains Skirafting

 

    A growing passion of mine as both paddler and skier is to seek not just wilderness whitewater or backcountry turns but rather seamless routes linking them in combination. Pursuit of snowpack+waterway landscape traverses in the American West brought me last spring to a region with very little of either - Southern Utah's Henry Mountains and the Dirty Devil canyon systems.

Ascending Mt. Pennell

    Partners with flexible time off, passion for hardship and background in both paddling and ski touring don't always fall in my lap, but sometimes they do. Liz Sampey spends her winter and spring seasons training for endurance bike races, but a concussion last fall and subsequent battle with Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS) was instead a source of both freedom and frustration through year. Acute challenges with memory and balance were persistent for months and cut her bike training short, but opened the door for other sporting opportunity.

    While a series of late winter storms in 2021 pushed the Henry mountains snowpack beyond our threshold for a green light, we were still never intending to find great whitewater or turns. Rather, the goal was to sneak through a desert landscape with water in some form under our boots or boats as far as we could. Because where we couldn't, we'd have to carry some of that water along with the gear inside our packs.

    The Dirty Devil River is mined for its water - upstream agricultural diversions run full steam during spring and summer but the shoulder seasons feature a trickle that paddlers can utilize. I've always found this run a paradoxical experience - an unending search for grass-is-greener deeper channel strands results in frequent boat dragging and a feeling of great inefficiency. And yet, a long day's push can land you 30 miles from where you started.

Brooke paddled with us down the Dirty Devil

    As recently as 2017, Lake Powell backed partway up the Dirty Devil River. Dropping lake levels in combination with re-mobilization of lake powell sediments have now extended a channelized Colorado River about 40 miles below the original lake head past the Dirty Devil all the way to the base of the Henry Mountains. How convenient, for those of us who choose to paddle the slowest craft available.

March 2021: Current and Channel on the Colorado extend to the Henry's

Summer 2017: Lake Powell backed up into the Dirty Devil

    The Henry mountains rise seven to eight thousand feet above the adjacent Colorado River. Our chosen pathway to reach them was Trachyte wash, named for the durable and somewhat uncommon volcanic rock type that composes the core of the Henry mountains. These gray boulders, shed from the high peaks, have helped winnow out narrows and slots in the softer red sandstones.

  

    Waiting for Liz to catch up in a part of the canyon 20 feet wide, she admitted her pace was slowed by vertigo, an off and on symptom of PCS. She could only stare at the ground. Visions of the slot ahead, 2 feet wide in places, entered my mind but I saw no point in bringing it up in that moment.

    Camped near the sole highway crossing on our 9 day route, we cached boat gear and waited for a storm to clear while pondering an early exit given a slowed pace and PCS symptoms.

    Next morning, refreshed and now sharpened by our decision to continue the route together with vertigo vanquished, we cached our boats and slotted up towards the Henry's.

    I purposefully routed us through an extended slot featuring chockstone upclimbs - with about ten of those it took us three hours to ascend the semi-technical canyon section. 

    Above the slot we ascended towards Mt. Hillers, but elected to semi-circumnavigate it on dirt road to make up pace.

    Camp set under full moon, on the north side of Mt. Hillers, we were set up for an ascent of the middle of the three snowpack-bearing peaks, Mt. Pennell

Ascending Pennell, Hillers behind

Capitol Reef below

Descending Pennell, Ellen ahead!

    All that I had expected in terms of snowpack travel were ridges/cornices thick enough to merit travel by ski. What I didn't expect was a perfect 4000' descent through powder-to-cream cheese-to-corn, but that's certainly what we found.

    A full day's effort up and over Mt. Pennell landed us at our penultimate camp at Pennellen Pass. By now we were conditioned to the routine of moving for 11 hours a day. Liz is used to much longer days when she's in shape for ultra-endurance races but had to settle for this pace to let her brain settle overnight - fine by me!

Up Ellen, Pennell behind

    It took us an entire day to ascend Ellen from the south and traverse its ridgeline northwards, gifted with the presence of a moderate gale. After ditching packs to tag the summit, we dropped a dozen turns off the ridgeline into a spruce glade, setting camp on a ~25 deg NE slope. Overnight the wind switched from a shelter-providing westerly to a upslope-scouring northerly and we slept very little in the spindrift.

    Descending down to snowline the final morning, an old timer intercepted us, wondering where we had been on Mt. Ellen. The previous afternoon he was scouting ski lines from several miles away with glasses when something caught his eye on the Ellen ridgeline - a mylar balloon driven by winds. As he traced its pathway, Liz and I moving the opposite direction along the ridgeline came into his field of view and he tracked us as we dropped into that small spruce glade bounded by open slopes. He had held his glasses to his eyes until his arms failed so he could trace our line, but only learned upon meeting us 15 hours later that we had set up camp just into the timber.

    A half-day slog through Pinyon-Juniper, wash and dirt road brought us back to the shuttled car. It was satisfying for Liz especially to push through and complete what was honestly a demanding trip, especially carrying so much gear most of the way, and to learn more about her limits and capabilities as an athlete living with a brain injury.

    I know I'm not the only skier who has spent years staring up at the Henry's in the spring wondering if it is worth the effort. Well, I'll certainly be back there but only after I scratch another desert skirafting itch in the same region.

Other Skiraft trip reports:

San Juan Mountains (Animas-Vallecito)

Idaho (Sawtooths-Middle Fork-Selway)

Paria River Flash Flood

    The Colorado Plateau sports a number of gorgeous sandstone canyons that are routinely to infrequently paddled - Cataract and Labryinth are runnable year round, while Muddy Creek, the San Rafael Black Boxes and the Virgin River system have semi-reliable snowmelt runoff or releases after good winters. Paddlers debate the merits of a predictable spring or fall scrape/walk/float down the Dirty Devil, or occasionally catch a few thousands cfs on a summer rain event. Some small drainages like Dark Canyon, Courthouse Wash, and Cottonwood Wash have been paddled, usually by locals. The Paria River, spanning terrain from Bryce Canyon to the head of the Grand Canyon, though gaged, produces exceptionally fleeting floods given the extent of its watershed.

A 2017 Sorbet Soiree on the Paria

                    And now, from 2021:

    I live between 4 and 5 hours drive from the Paria, but if I wait for a flood to show up on the gage the river is reduced to a trickle by the time I arrive. So, the two types of events that produce marginally predictable flows: summer monsoon rains and winter rain-on-snow, must be anticipated. This is a difficult, frustrating and time consuming process that I don't want to get into the weeds about here. Suffice to say, I've now made it work for 2 out of 4 attempts based in Durango.

     The first success came in the winter of 2017:

(click for old video from 2017)

with Flows ranging from 120 cfs (narrows) to 200 cfs (boulder gardens) to 300 cfs (exit)

My initial trip spanned Feb 10-12. Shown: three diurnal snowmelt pulses followed by rain-on snow

    In mid-August 2021, an active phase of the monsoon created an opportunity. Usually a single dose of rain is too difficult to predict with enough geographic accuracy to justify driving for 5 hours, but the Paria basin had gotten hit with three runoff-producing events in 24 hours and a fourth was on the way. With soils/sand/substrate likely saturated, Tom and I decided to gamble on a trip. We drove out as the fourth rain event was occurring, and it looked like only slightly promising accumulation compared to the prior events. 

    Boy were we surprised when we reached the put-in!

Fourth rain spike arrived around 9am Aug 19. The Paria had only been that high twice since 2014.

    We didn't see that the gage had spiked at over 3000 cfs until after we finished the run (data reporting lag), we only knew the last report was 800+ and rising, but clearly it was going to be high. We weren't quite on the peak, but damn close and rode high water the whole way to the first serious rapids near the end of the narrows around mile 25.

    How high? I went back through my footage from the 2017 winter run to compare water lines to this 2021 summer run, and here are some sketches from roughly the same positions:

Entering the Narrows

2017

2021

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Slideblock Arch

2017

2021

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mid-Narrows rockfall rapid

2017

2021

        These are all relatively wide parts of the narrows, and in the short slot sections I'd guess our 2021 flood had water 8-10+ ft higher than our 2017 run. Even at extreme flows, I anticipated the low river gradient would produce little more than boils and seams - cobble bar riffles in the narrows could be run on the inside of corners and the rockfall only occurred in wide parts of the narrows so holes could be dodged. I'd read reports of successful hardshell descents around 500 cfs, so how different could 800+ be? Well, even given that we were actually riding >2000 cfs, I was mostly right. About 99.9% right. However, one of the roughly 3 slot sections (all 6-10 ft wide) featured an eddyless and narrowing run-in that started with mild laterals but delivered us straight into a set of crashing waves that was downright terrifying (starts at 1:00 in the video below). 

    In retrospect, it was fortunate that we couldn't stop to scout because there was no time get frightened or psyched out... we were just in it and had to execute. A wave hit my face and gopro at video minute mark 1:18 and obscured the view, but there were another few crashing waves followed by a boof off the side of a large submerged boulder into a relatively placid mudpool.

  Here's POV video of the run:

(Click for Video)

    The first overwhelming part of this experience, for me, was the smell. The river emits a heavy odor of wet earth that just penetrates everything; it felt like it was accumulating in my lungs. As we worked our way down the braided approach to the narrows, dodging active log jams, we got our first doses of mud/sand/water droplets. A single drop in the eye was somewhat crippling, and we both came to the conclusion that a swim, or even flip, or even a crashing wave to the face, could be catastrophic. 

    The water was so thick with sediment that it behaved and looked and felt different even compared to other desert floods I've paddled. The San Rafael or LCR at high flows were nothing compared to this, though the lack of foam here that the LCR featured is still curious to me. The combination of both mud and sand made it difficult to grip my paddle shaft - I took to dipping my hand in the river and immediately shaking the sand (not mud) off, then using my muddy hand to wipe the sand off the shaft. Otherwise I had too shaky of a grip. Awful. At every stop I would have to shovel handfuls of sand, foam, sticks, needles and juniper berries out of my cockpit.

    The somewhat predictable nature of the cobble bar rapids in the narrows became routine - strong boils off the walls were at worst meddlesome for our downriver progress. 

    One of the river-running problems at low flow in 2017 was that eddies were mostly filled in with sand so eddy hopping was not entirely easy. In 2021, eddies were much more workable in the vicinity of rapids.

    Working through the Paria narrows, the river cuts progressively deeper into the massive sandstones, exposing more easily erodible units underneath. This has caused the tall sandstone walls to retreat away from the river, but at the same time allows large blocks from the cliffs above to fall into the river channel. This, in combination with the higher gradient (~80ft/mi), forms a 4 mile long crux section of III/IV or IV/V rapids, depending on flow. 

    The first set of rapids we encountered, bedrock ledge plus giant boulder affairs, were mostly flooded out wave trains (!), but due to time spent scouting and portaging the water was quickly draining out. Fortunately, at the crux boulder gardens towards the end the water had already dropped by 3'. We still portaged about 5 rapids overall.

recent high water mark visible on left boulder

    Part of our plan involved not spending time to set shuttle at Lee's Ferry, so before our hike out over Dominguez pass back towards HWY 89 we spent the night. Meaning we had no spare water to clean gear or ourselves until the next day...

    Seven hours out of the canyon, over the pass and down towards the highway the next day.

    Would I do it again? Hell no! I mean, maybe...

    If you made it this far and still thirst for muck, check out MC's post from their winter run in 2019. Small flow for the narrows but similar flows in the lower rapids, and they used real cameras.