I get in my boat first and slide into the eddy. Paddler #4 asks if I want him to follow me. "Yeah, please
follow me." I wait for him to get into the eddy and I peel out. I motor to the middle looking for my landmark to slide down the lateral wave and
punch the first hole. First thing I notice as I approach the horizon line is that the river is hauling ass at this point, but I'm right where I
want to be-slide down the lateral wave and punch the first hole. I keep motoring, trying not to lose too much momentum and I hit the second hole,
which really slows me down and the reaction wave behind it flips me. I snap off a quick roll, realizing that I'm now backwards moving into the final
MONSTER hole. I spin myself quickly and line up on the far river left wall for what looks like a big boof over the hole and into the eddy. To my
disbelief, I'm right on line. As I approach the final horizon line, I see what we couldn't see from our poor scouting point-this hole is BAD-BIGGER
than HUGE and BAD. I threw a big right boof stroke for all I was worth, but it might as well have been a backstroke.
You know the feeling when you hit
a big hole and it feels like you hit a brick wall? Well this felt like someone was driving a brick wall 30mph at me when I dropped into this hole. It
felt like I pitoned something, but I didn't piton anything. Not only did I lose all forward momentum, but was going backwards and sideways into the
middle of the river at warp speed. I was getting my rodeocreekin' on, and this is becoming a bad habit for me. I managed to stay upright most of the
time, got shaded a few times, and threw a couple of creekwheels. The whole time I'm in the hole I'm being pushed farther to river right, where there is a
tree pinned at 50-degree angle at the lip of the ledge and against the far right wall. I intermittently catch glimpses of this tree, which is
beginning to concern me. Finally, I stabilize in the hole just long enough to realize that I'm upright, pointing upriver, and I'm in the bottom
of a huge hole getting shoved into a tree-BAD.
I take the opportunity and take a big lefty stroke and shove myself into the downflow, which
effectively pops me out of the hole backwards, about three feet from getting shoved into the pin tree. I roll up just in time to see paddler #4 drop
into the hole on far left and get shot far right and after a couple of shades, get flushed out. By the time he's out, I'm about 100ft below the
hole in a small eddy just as paddler #1 drops into the far left of the hole. His boat disappears for a split second and then gets shot completely
out of the water into a backloop down into the hole, which immediately pulls him into the middle of the river. He proceeds to get pummeled,
pretty significantly I might add. After hanging in for a long while, without a breath, his boat completely disappears for about a three count.
"Carnage count - two paddles gone, one boat gone, two swims, and one paddler unaccounted for."
It resurfaces and begins cartwheeling violently, and then paddler #1 pops up about 20ft out from the drop at the edge of the boil line. Paddler
#4 paddles up to him and pulls him close to the river right wall where I have a rope ready. Paddler #1 gets out of the water, boat still
in the hole, breakdown paddle nowhere to be seen. Paddler #2 is still nowhere to be seen-can you say, "very concerned." Paddler #3 just
witnessed three ass-whoopings and a swim. I signal to him that I've got a rope ready in case he swims and he give the thumbs up (he had
been filming our ass-whoopings). He really doesn't have a choice, so he peels out and runs a clean line through the top three holes,
boofs hard left ANDÉmystery moves in the hole and pops up in the middle of the river riding a huge stern squirt as he gets shot out of
the hole. We're talking some serious down time!
Still no sign of paddler #2-very worried at this point, but hey, we're moving as
fast as safely possible here. Paddler #1's boat gets flushed by this point (after spending about three-five minutes in the hole) and paddler
#4 tries for all he's worth to round it up. Problem is the "pool" below this monster hole is moving VERY swiftly into another
horizon line that looks like a mirror image of the one we just ran with another monster, unscoutable hole at the bottom.
Paddler #1's boat ends up disappearing into the holes below us.
Carnage count - two paddles gone, one boat gone, two swims, and one paddler unaccounted for. This is in the first mile of Yellowjacket Creek.
Now, paddlers #4 and #3 are standing on a small ledge under a 40ft cliff on river left while paddler #1 and myself are on river right. Paddler #1
has no option but to hike, actually more like climb, out at this point. He knows that there is a road to McCoy Creek, which flows in just upriver
from where we are, and that he can get out on that road. About now someone starts blasting on a whistle and no one can figure out who it is. After
a moment of confusion, we realize that it's coming from the top of the cliff above paddlers #3 & #4 on river left. It's paddler # 2!!! He's okay, but
has a story of his own. He yells down that he lost his boat and needs to hike out.
I paddle over to river left and those of us who still have all of
our gear have a little pow-wow. One mile into the trip-two swims, two lost boats, two lost paddles, and it gets worse. Paddler #2 swam in the same
monster hole that we got whooped in, but he got WORKED. According to him, he came out of his boat after hanging in for what seemed like forever. Well,
when he came out of his boat he got stuck in the rinse cycle with no good air in his lungs. He stopped counting when he got pulled back into the hole the
third time. He says that the last time he got pulled in he was completely out of air-completely. Balled up as tight as he could manage, got
pushed DEEP and popped up in a feeder eddy going back into the hole. He managed to swim like he was possessed and clawed his way onto a ledge where he began
coughing up water. He managed to get his paddle back, but his boat was impossible to reach-he was by himself.
So to finish this novel, the three of us decided that we had all of our gear still, today's tally "river vs. kayakers" was definitely not
in our favor, none of us (who still had boats) knew the rest of the river, there was no way to portage the next drop, we didn't know if there was a better place
to get out, and we had a guaranteed path of egress where we were with paddler #2 on top of the cliff with a rope. The decision was made to call it a day and
begin the hike/climb out of the canyon.
We lined the remaining boats and paddles up the cliff and then climbed out of the bottom of the canyon while paddler #1 began the hike to the road that goes
to McCoy Creek (there was no reasonably safe way to get him across to our side of the river considering the safest option was for him to hike out on the McCoy
Creek road). Here's the ironic part. We joked about how much it would suck if the take-out was the same as the put-in-well it was, except that it sucked
even worse than we had joked about. It was about a thousand vertical feet up, no trail, random dead ends because of small cliffs, and big old dead trees that needed
to be climbed over. We finally got out and paddler #4 and myself ran to the truck at the put-in and drove back to pick up the other two
paddlers, arriving at the take-out just as paddler #1 was getting his dry clothes on.
Rough day, bummer about the gear, but the point is that everyone came out okay after a couple of VERY close calls. Take your own lessons from this report, we
all did. Yellowjacket Creek above 1000cfs is class V with very demanding hydraulics. Paddler #2 nearly drowned, we lost two boats, two paddles, and each
got to get a little rodeocreekin' practice in that day. Beatings taken, lessons learned, paddle safe, have fun, and ALWAYS look out for each other-even
if you're paddling class II water. Water is water if it gets in your lungs.
