(Disclaimer: This is satire. If you can’t take it as such, please don’t read this story.)
It was summertime during one of the best water years the Pacific Northwest had seen in a long time and I was itching to get out there. It had been 11 years since I had done a PNW Huckfest and Dogg fans were wondering if I was ever going to return!! Does a frog have a water-tight butthole?
It may have been a long and winding road leading me back to the PNW’s door but it had never disappeared. My inner spirit mood was off since Mercury was in retrograde and I needed some kayaking to reset my balance. Coming back to this favorite area would certainly warm my heart like a fleece blanket on a cold day. Really?
I lined up my schedule with long-time friend and adventurer Bryon Dorr, who lives out there, and bought my plane ticket. Joining me from the East Coast to complete the crew was Great Falls regular and boof aficionado, Keith Pendergrast.
We had 8 days in late June/early July to get SIK out in the PNW! It was all falling into place like Tetris.
Boat Choices
The first order of business was to decide which boat to take. With so many awesome Dagger designs to pick from, it was a difficult choice between the medium or large Code, and the Phantom. I put the three boat names into an online spinner and spun the wheel. Random chance selected the Phantom, which I was excited about because I have always liked that design.
There was a day when that boat was the Abbott to my Costello, the Simon to my Garfunkle, the David Lee Roth to my Eddie Van Halen but it hadn’t come off the boat rack since the Code was launched. Now that the important decision had been made, it was time to go #phantomfast!
Upon arrival in Portland, I had a lazy morning while Keith drove down from Seattle. I went to the local store to get plenty of water for the trip. I only drink water that is 9.2 ph, coming from a geothermal single source with natural alkaline only found 2 miles deep in the Earth’s crust.
I was anxious to get started, like a lab pulling at the chain on the first day of pheasant season!
PNW Huckfest Day 1
We finally headed out in search of stouts around 4pm. Being unsure of the water levels and what might be still running even by Dogg standards, we decided to feel things out like a blind man at an orgy.
We headed to the Money Drop in hopes that it might have enough water. I had run it at low flow before and it was still super fun, so I had my fingers crossed for similar conditions. We hiked up from below and found the falls to be much lower than anticipated. Womp, womp.
We decided to go check out Eagle Creek on the off chance that it might still have some flow. Similar to Money Drop, there just wasn’t enough flow to run Metlako with any degree of padding in the landing.
It was a disappointing day 1: no cake, no ice cream, happy birthday! Yessir, we were in the shallow like Lady Gaga so we headed back to Portland to reset for the next day’s mission.
Farmlands, Truss, Little White in a Day
The next day, we linked up with a group to paddle the Farmlands into the Green Truss, followed by an evening Little White. This got me a blue zone warmup to prepare my body for increased rate of fat release and higher intensities to come before moving into a more challenging but doable green zone paddling going through Class 5 rapids.
These runs are spectacular sections and have phenomenal rapids. However, I had a big list of adventures that I wanted to hit up on the trip including Sahalie Falls. We kept running into roadblocks with getting a third boater to round out our crew and make things a little safer. Bryon caught Covid just before I arrived so he wasn’t able to go. It seemed like a strong case of “Columbia River Gorgitis” had overtaken the boaters of the area and no one wanted to run anything but the White Salmon or Little White. Every good paddling area has this problem and sometimes you just end up paddling the classics instead of hucking the meat.
A wise man once reminded me that the classics are classic for a reason, so I can’t blame people for wanting to stay close to home and stick with what they know. Still, Sahalie Falls was at the top of my list and I wasn’t just going to give up right away.
I needed to act like a woodpecker in a petrified forest: keep busy and look for opportunities.
North Fork of the Lewis
With the desire to get out and have an adventure off the beaten path, Keith and I decided to do a two-man excursion to the North Fork of the Lewis. Many people poo poo this run since it is a long drive for not many rapids. However, Upper and Lower Lewis Falls are two of the coolest drops I’ve ever run! Anyone who has a problem with them has got a problem with me, and I suggest you let that one marinate!
We had about 1,100 cfs and I was hoping it would be that magic level where both the Upper and Lower Falls would be good. We put on and hit our warmup falls, a 20-footer called Taitnatum Falls. Soon, we hopped out to look at the Upper Falls. The river is wide above and the water was too low to float all the way to the lip. This made the water also very thin on the normal spot where you run the top 30-footer. The channel on the right would have been runnable but it was littered with trees that blocked the line. It wasn’t in the cards for this day.
We headed downstream over a fun slide at the Middle Falls and soon were scouting the Lower Falls. A large crowd filled with MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of Dogg fans had gathered at the falls with high anticipation! The falls are quite formidable at this flow and feature a fast lead-in to a 5-foot ledge right at the lip of a 40+ foot waterfall with a foreboding spray shooting up from the maelstrom at the bottom!
The hydraulic in the first ledge could slow you down enough to fall awkwardly off the main falls. There have been harrowing tales of people pulled behind the curtain of the falls into a cave where escape is extremely difficult!
I started walking back to my boat. A few of the people in the crowd approached me, wanting to know my decision. How could I disappoint the people who had taken the time to come to this falls to witness greatness? This was no time to nurture your green bananas to turn yellow, the moment to get SIK was NOW! You only get one shot, one moment! You know, no time to vomit your mom’s spaghetti on your sweater like that one rap song!
I knew I could hit the line but also knew I would need to be precise with my strokes. To help my chances, I downed a shot of Call of the Wild energy drink: a potent mix of jackal spit and horsefly urine that instantly gave me the strength of 10 grown adults!
I came down the fast approach and lined up in the middle of the 5-foot ledge. I took a stroke to keep my bow on the surface and skipped across the hole to the lip of the big falls. I took a big lefty stroke and threw in a righty part way down to give me an extra boost. I launched out free of the hole and landed flat before paddling out through the mist.
I’m not going to say it was the greatest line ever laid down by a kayaker but it may have been the best line ever laid down by a kayaker. Am I right? You know I am, you don’t have to answer me. Oh yesh!
It was an awesome feeling to stomp this huge drop. The thrill of this drop made me feel powerful enough to accomplish anything, even throw a helicopter out of the sky with my mind! As wonderful as it was for me, I can only imagine how fortunate the onlookers felt to have gotten to witness my line off the falls. It must have been like watching the Beatles or Jesus perform at Red Rocks! My only regret is that I wasn’t able to watch myself run this drop live.
Surf to L Dub
After a fun day, kayak surfing at Indian Beach, we met up with former East coasters Geoff Calhoun, Max Blackburn, and Matt Anger for a fun sunny day on the Little White. It was like Christmas in July! What? Who says stuff like that? I believe you’ll get you’re a$$ kicked saying things like that!
The Little White is the holy grail of steep creeks and hands down has to be the best Class 5 run on the planet if I’m being honest. Honesty is the best policy, although by default dishonesty is the second best policy.
The whitewater out there is fast and steep with tons of boofs, slides, and waterfalls that keep coming at you from start to finish. Even the smaller drops require precise boof strokes to keep your momentum and keep on line. Yessir, the Little White will keep you on your toes like a short person at a urinal! That run will have you working like the Energizer Bunny beating on the drum!!
I got in the groove and found my Orange effect, where I was using optimal oxygen consumption and ideal heart rate metrics! Oh yeah! I had reached that magical moment where everything is right in the slot, just above the click! We cruised down hitting boof after boof. Our crew was a lot of fun to paddle with and we knocked out two good runs before a relaxing evening hanging out in Hood River.
More Green Truss
We hit the Green Truss again the next day, which was holding steady at an awesome level close to 3 feet. It is wild that a run so incredible is downgraded to #2 like a pencil by the nearby Little White. On that note, the #2 pencil is the number one selling pencil in the world, yet it is still stuck at #2. So sad.
On this day, I was determined to fire up the gnarly center boof at Big Brother. It is such a magnificent kicker that I needed to hit, if for no other reason than to leave no boof left unlaunched.
It required speed off a short runway, a pinch of grace (not the whole cup), and a committed boof stroke. No room to look like a bison falling off a cliff on this one! The landing was tight like the skin on a gooseberry and there were tales of paddlers overshooting the line and reconnecting with the bank on the way down! A stiff piton off that volcanic rock would really knock the salt off your rim!
To calculate my margin for error, I took the square root of the sample size divided by the standard deviation, multiplied by my confidence interval. This yielded a 99% chance of SIKness and a 1 percent chance of landing on the bank, battered and broken.
I lined up my boat and accelerated toward the launch pad. I ended up catapulting off the upturned boof rock, sending my bow up in a wheelie! I sailed through the air, pancaking into the pool below, landing just next to the bank! Oh yesh! What an awesome line!
Three cheers for SIK boofs! Why 3? Why not 2 or 4? No one will ever know.
Spirit For Days
As the days passed, the prospect of going to Sahalie Falls seemed to drift further and further away. Missing out on a dangerous falls like Sahalie is kind of like watching your landlord drive off a cliff in a new Cadillac, you have mixed feelings.
We continued to head back to the Little White because we honestly couldn’t get enough of that run! There’s nothing wrong with going back to the well that brought your horse to the dance!
Spirit Falls is definitely the main attraction on this run and is certainly one of the most incredible waterfalls anywhere. With its formidable height (33 feet) and large volume spout with accompanying gigantic boil at the bottom, it is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Allow me to sum up running this waterfall with this hypothetical syllogism. Any kayaker who runs Spirit Falls is a bada$$! The Dogg runs Spirit Falls! Therefore, the Dogg is a bada$$!
I had gotten several massive launches off this drop on this trip, which had kept me safe from the clutches of the mayhem at the bottom of the falls. However, my back was feeling the effects of these flat landings and I needed to find a smoother way to run it. I needed a landing that was less physically taxing so I was determined to hit the water at a 45-degree angle.
I approached the falls with a little less speed and tried to time a light stroke at the lip. I landed gently and all was going well until that dastardly boil at the bottom of the falls grabbed me and flipped me. I then was violently tossed around like Godzilla with a railroad car! I was getting yanked around so I clamped down on my paddle shaft grip like a bear trap on a chicken leg! My kayak smashed against the wall and I worried I was trapped behind the falls. Spirit was dishing out a good old-fashioned passionate a$$ whoopin and I was getting my shoes, coat, and hat tooken! I had entered the gateway to a sea of nightmares!
I had definitely hit the red zone, needing to go all out and use everything in the tank to survive! It felt like the time I was stuck in the Water Temple of Zelda’s Ocarina of Time for months! I decided to hang out for a little bit in hopes that things would calm down a bit. Eventually, the chaos abated and I was able to roll up. I don’t think I’m going to come into Spirit Falls at less than full speed again, my back be damned!
Pastoral Climax
On the last day of the trip, Bryon was feeling better so we decided to do the lower gorge of the White Salmon. I had always heard that this stretch was beautiful and featured some fun rapids, so I wanted to check it out.
I know you are probably thinking that the Dogg has gone soft, opting for a pastoral float instead of finishing the trip with a wildly theatrical climax! You may even be wondering what’s next for the Dogg: Light beer? Veggie burgers? Automatic transmission? You may even declare me the winner of the Charmin Ultrasoft Player of the Game! All kidding aside, the lower section of the White Salmon is a fantastic section of river and it did not disappoint. Bryon was not feeling up for anything crazy so this was the perfect run. Besides, time spent with good friends is one of the greatest joys in life!
We started with a sweet boof off Husum Falls and continued down several lively miles of constant rapids and beautiful scenery. Oh yes, our troubles were blowing away in the wind like the seed pods on a dandelion!
Soon, the gorge walls narrowed and the rapids became more exciting and boily. We hopped out to scout Steelhead Falls, a 5-foot drop with a large walled-in hole. There was a nice boof on the right to skip over the hole.
We continued downstream through the prettiest section of the run. Before long, we arrived at the Columbia River and a fantastic end to our trip.
More PNW Huckfests to Come
We headed to the clubs in Portland that night to celebrate what had been a top-notch paddling escapade! I took advantage of my credit card’s No Questions Asked policy and had Keith sign for our bill. I called the credit card company the next day and claimed my card had been stolen. They bought my story and took away the charges. By the time the authorities caught wind of it and started an investigation, I had already boarded my plane and fled to the East Coast! Good times!
It was a wonderful trip to the PNW but, similar to that frightening moment when you reach the end of the toilet paper roll, you don’t know what you got til it’s gone. I certainly can’t wait to return, so, until the next adventure…
