ARCHIVE
Clear Creek is a well known run outside of Golden, Colorado, about half an hour west of Denver. Currently (as of July 2005) the road appears closed (at Highway 6, which you access from Denver via 76 west to 58 west) bcoz of a rock slide 9 miles up, but they are allowing 'Recreational' traffic to drive up as far as you can go, which is really super cool of Colorado - the State of Oregon (where I'm from) would have shut it down to everyone, bcoz they're grumpy. Needless to say, other than a few rock climbers, you'll have the entire gorge to yourself should you choose to run this section!
I had planned to ride with the RMR guys once before, and my trip to Denver was met that time with a freak blizzard. This time, the weather was cooperative, and Darryl suggested that we check out Clear Creek gorge, with the promise that there was some big water to be ridden. I scouted it upon arriving in town and it definitely looked steep and fast, but other than a couple sections I was questioning the ‘big’ part. Somehow my sense of accurate ratings has run away from me, I suppose… Since the road was closed 9 miles up the gorge and I had driven the whole stretch the previous day, we didn’t feel like running the whole thing since it all appeared the same (in my mind) and we were both on time constraints. So we put in somewhere above either tunnel 3 or 4, I don’t remember which. Darryl was a good sport about the whole thing, considering this was only his sophomore year riverboarding and I’m not the best judge of how big water actually is – I was thinking it was a III+, and then I come to find out after the fact that the whole run is rated a class V by the American Whitewater Association! Darryl did awesome for his first time in fast (it drops 112 feet per mile) and big water, though.
We eddied out a few times to rest as we made our way down, bcoz the creek was haulin’ and we had to maneuver quite a bit to stay in the right line – that gets tiring! We stopped just above the Narrows section to catch our breath, and I gave Darryl a few words of advice about hydraulics and going faster than the river to steer, and assured him that this wasn’t much bigger than what he’d already gone through like a champ. Of course, as anyone who has ever followed a bad driver knows, when you’re the lead car you’re never supposed to run yellow lights! And unfortunately for Darryl, I did, right at the top of the Narrows. The river goes under the road and immediately takes a sharp right, however much of the water stays left and goes through a nasty group of boulders and into the wall. I managed to cut back right to avoid it and signaled in vain for Darryl to go right, but he had been following me and had not anticipated I’d make a crazy last second move. We were in, though, and while I saw him head left, at that point there was nothing I could do but hold my line and hope he was behind me. So I’m bouncing down through the rapid, avoiding slamming into the wall of the gorge, ripping through hydraulics, and all of a sudden, “Whoa! That horizon line looks bigger than it did from the road!” I flew down the drop and spun around, fumbling to get my camera ready and hoping he was behind me. He wasn’t…and I was now going backwards through the rest of the rapid, still waiting (pictured below on my second run through).
While I was having a jolly ol’ time boarding through the rapid, unbeknownst to me Darryl was swimming for his life – the boulder field had chewed him up and spit him out without his board, and since he didn’t leash to it, they parted ways. He said he heeded my advice about relaxing in the hydraulics though, and managed to SWIM about 300 yards through the rapid, reaching the shore via the eddy on river-left just before he plunged over the slide (pictured above). Swimming without your board is never safe, and the hydraulic at the bottom of the left side (where he was headed) was nasty, so it’s a really good thing he got out in time.
Of course, I was freaked out when all of a sudden his board came bouncing down the river without him…I had managed to get stopped on a rock, so I jumped back into the flow and grabbed his board, riding both boards down about another 50 yards before I was able to get to shore. Still no Darryl. I started a hasty scramble to get my flippers off when I saw him way up on the cliff waving. Whew – he was ok. He had a long hike to get back to the tunnel and the road, and understandably called it a day. For his first really big water though he tore it up, and I learned a valuable lesson about being the lead driver in unfamiliar waters. I really believe also that most of it is psychological – had we known that the creek was a class V run, it might have affected our judgement. Instead, by scouting and believing that we could safely and effectively run it, we did. Of course, I’m not sure I necessarily recommend that mindset to everybody, unless you’re with someone who knows what you’re actually getting into. Positive thinking will certainly get you through Class IV stuff, but it probably won’t get you over Niagara. Well, ok, it’ll get you over it…just not in one piece!
Now for the big boy, the rapid known as Rigormortis. I’d scouted this really well the previous day and had no question it was runnable, and that it would be a fun run as well. I’m glad I didn’t know that it is rated V+ bcoz in my mind it looked like a IV with a nasty IV+ hole, and I approached it as such. Darryl got a great sequence of photos, which I have put together with my comments all the way through.
*UPDATE* After reading up on this rapid a bit more, I discovered why I felt it warranted a IV+ rating - I ran it at about 540 CFS, while the AW rating of 5.3 ( V+) is at 900 CFS. At almost twice the water flow, I can see how it could become a V+. The rocks on the river-right side would be covered, changing the line, most likely, and the lower section would become a much more difficult move to avoid slamming into the undercut rock. The hydraulic might be less sticky (that's often the case with much higher water, it levels out) but twice as much water going through the same narrow space would be amazing - I'll be back to run it next spring and find out! After running Rigormortis and going back up to The Narrows for another set of pictures, we went down to Golden to the whitewater park there on Clear Creek just to see what was going on. It was a montage of families with kids in softball uniforms, teenagers on innertubes, kayakers in playboats, and whoa, a huge group of riverboarders! It was a bunch of people doing demos on the Ripboards, so we hung out and watched them float down.
Overall it was a really fun day, and I look forward to running the whole stretch again next year when it’s really rippin’. Bcoz it’s mainly just a long channel of waves (although that channel DOES meander around quite a bit, so reading whitewater is a must-have skill) it is a fairly safe run, but the ‘fun’ level is extremely high due to the steepness! However, due to the speed at which you need to make decisions, I don’t recommend this run to anybody who is not really comfortable in Class IV whitewater. If you are, though, it’s awesome, and the road runs right along it the whole way, making scouting easy and allowing for you to run whatever sections you want.
~Ice~
|
