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)

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.