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Sometime between runs my camera jumped out of my hands and leapt like a Lemming into the river, which led me to plunge in after it (also like a Lemming), too late realizing I had no fins on and without them it’s much harder to navigate water with a mind of its own. The camera got stuck in an eddy. The board P threw in got stuck in a cave. I floated downriver. After a long scramble on the mossy cliffs, I was able to grab the camera from the eddy, get swept down into the cave with the board, and spent the next 5 minutes or so rising and falling in a mad attempt to get out of the surging cave. Don’t leave your flippers on the bank.
Docta P said he felt like his fins were going to come off there was so much suction on his legs when he ran the whole thing straight. That’s the beauty of a board – bcoz they float mostly up top, they allow the rider to escape a lot of the bad hydraulic suction. Surface tension is our friend…losing your board would be extremely dangerous, and honestly could happen easily, as fast as the water was churning from the slide to the main pool. A leash is your friend in such predicaments, bcoz the board is more buoyant than you are, so the board helps pull you forward and up out of the hydraulic. From what I could find on this river, at lower flows The Narrows is rated a V and with more water it levels out to a big wave train IV+. We’ll find out when there’s more water - I would tend to think more water would make it more challenging, not less. Simply because of the sheer speed at the start and the complexity of the rise and fall (and the nasty suction), I’d say it’s on the lower edge of V, so a V- at this flow. You should be comfortable running steep drops (there's a big rock on the right, so drop it left!), fast, churning whitewater, and re-circulating hydraulics, and you’ll have fun! Just don’t lose your camera…
From there on down the rest of the trip was fun though uneventful. There are several small and fun rapids, at this flow II+, with more water probably III, nothing difficult though until Niagara. After we got back I did some research on this river (considering we were like, “Is this the Little North Santiam or the North Santiam? Is it illegal to run this? Are we going uphill?), since we tend to find rivers we know nothing about and run them (at least we scouted this time!). It turns out there are a couple more miles below Niagara of good Class III, and I also learned that the river gets higher in the fall bcoz they start releasing water from the dam. So it should be a fun fall run when little else is running!
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