Class V Packrafting: Middle Kings

 

   Through the 2019 spring season, having pulled off successful runs on serious backcountry creeks and rivers in Colorado's San Juan mountains (Vallecito, Brazos, Pinos) on the heels of Bull Lake Creek I finally started to believe that I was up for the next major milestone, the Middle Kings: a legendary remote, unrelenting and punishing river that cuts a yosemite-like valley while dropping from over 8000' along the PCT down to 1000' in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This river, one of the benchmarks of North America class V expedition kayaking, had been our stated goal for that year.

    Even though our 2019 Middle Kings run went better than we had expected, I had never felt more drained of adrenaline, worn down and beat up.

The Exit of Waterfall Gorge, 2019 (Photo John Baker)

Here's my video from that first trip:

(Click for the 2019 Video)

 In the continuing spirit of exploring new-to-me terrain in the 2020 season, I had my eye on a couple of missions in Canada, Idaho and other Sierra Nevada runs. Every time Dan and I discussed ideas I would present a different one, but Dan settled into consistent promotion of another crack at the Middle Kings. We warmed up on a Cherry Creek lap followed by a low flow trip through cherry bomb, after which Dan humored me for a headwaters exploration run in a nearby drainage:

but I eventually relented and saddled up for Middle Kings round two. This year we had a much shorter and more scenic approach (the standard one over Bishop Pass), superior boats (Valkyrie prototypes) plus more confidence in our own selves. Allen joined us from Durango for his second packraft trip, his first being the Animas-Vallecito Skiraft linkup.

    Subject to an inflexible schedule and meteorological whimsy, we ended up with a much lower flow this year - 600 cfs at Rodgers Crossing. But first, and possibly unique among Middle Kings paddlers, we got to fully enjoy our hike in over the Sierra crest.

Slab camp next to the put-in just above Palisade Creek

    And we're off on the Middle Kings! 

    The first few warm-up slides helped suppress the butterflies enough for Dan and I to take a crack at an oft-portaged drop: Squeeze Play (of course aided by half the flow kayakers typically have):

A tricky entrance resulted in this somewhat successful contortion

Clip of Squeeze Play

This gave us hope that some of the bigger features further down would go. We were right.

Money Drop

unnamed slides

    Dan and I had portaged the above series of drops in 2019, while John took a ride in a weir hole just below the drop where Dan is pictured above. This year it proved problematic in different ways - I hung up on a boulder at the bottom and had to roll off it, while Dan took a faceshot to the large undercut boulder on the bottom left (!). Fortunately we were able to shake it off.

    Dan had showed us portagers up on Money Drop and lead the charge down Breakfast Slide, a tempting but very long slide with a tough pothole at the bottom:

Dan probes Breakfast Slide

The pothole at the bottom of Breakfast slide is a difficult off-camber hit

    The standard (kayak) line involves skirting the left side of the pothole, but with packrafts and low flows that part of the slide just wanted to roll you over your right side into the pothole landing. Dan's difficulty with this standard left line gave me pause and I eventually settled on a wall-tapping right line

Breakfast Slide POV

    Waterfall Gorge was relatively easy to pick apart at low flow, but still demanded a scout and safety below the marquee waterfall given the boxed-in terminal hole lurking just below the large pool

Dan takes the plunge

Allen's last big feature before succumbing to a nagging shoulder injury

    We camped just below the waterfall, and Dan and I were treated to some fantastic slides to start the day.

    Dan and I ran some sections and portaged a good bit below here, careful to avoid Raw Dog gorge which looked incredibly spicy at this flow (or any flow). Allen, with his somewhat injured shoulder, decided to walk from Simpson Meadow down to Tehipite valley, skipping the Middle Four (and would hike out to a trailhead from there - no trail exists along the Bottom Nine below Tehipite)

    It turned into a very long day pushing the whole way through Simpson meadow and the Middle Four to get to Tehipite, a splendid camp. Taller than El Cap!! We expeditiously avoided photo stops until the next day as we proceeded towards the start of the infamous Bottom Nine.

The last of the low gradient beneath Tehipite Dome

...and she disappears after the Bottom Nine starting line

    Whereas our first run in 2019 had filled us with great intrepidation, Dan and I were now filled with great intrepidation and a little bit of confidence. These new boats were much superior even to the Alpackalypses we had used previously, in control, speed through features and rollability.

    However, despite fewer portages and scouts than the previous year, the grueling nature of the Bottom Nine caught up to us. Whereas the upper slide sections on Days 1 into 2 had the air of thrill and glory, the Bottom Nine on Day 3 turned into an onslaught. Both Dan and I each had a particularly ugly swim as the day wore on, with Dan now nursing an injury (developed on Upper Cherry's Kiwi-in-a-Pocket) that cast a question mark over his ability to continue paddling. I was in no mood to take pictures or even video, and right after a scary swim where Dan plucked me out of a mid-river eddy just above an awful drop, we had no choice but to call it a day.

Dan assess his assets at the final camp. Upside-down no-longer-live-oak for scale.

    In the morning we continued. Only a few of the more challenging rapids remained, and an overnight recovery had worked wonders. In the end, we had successfully paddled the Middle Kings, in packrafts, with only a handful of portages on the Bottom Nine.

Confluence!

Here's my 2020 Video from the Middle Kings run:

(Click for 2020 Video)

Even at lower flows, the 'runout' on Garlic Falls is a serious affair

Finishing on fumes, we both agreed to take a year off from this one, and this time we meant it.

NOTE: the Middle Kings (sans Bottom Nine) was also packrafted in 2021 by another team around 1100 cfs. No media from that trip except a selfie with Dane Jackson at Tehipite.

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.