River Notes 1

When Paige and I started to paddle down the middle reaches of the Willamette river, say from Salem to Saint Paul, we found a number of excellent places to hunt for rocks. Two large island rock bars were particularly fine and we even camped out on one of them a number of times so that we could use the low rays of the setting and rising sun to hunt out those allusive agates that hide during the heat of the midday. 

The first of these places that we found was the Candiani Bar. It is just upriver from the county park near Saint Paul that is called San Salvador. San Salvador is an old steam boat landing that sits amongst a farmers field a good mile outside of the little town of Saint Paul proper. It is just a little unpaved dirt loop with parking for around 15 cars and a little concrete slab boat ramp. It is a popular place with the locals for an afternoon swim or some fishing and goes up and down in seediness perhaps dependent on whether or not someone has decided to pick up trash there or not. It needs a pit toilet and a trash bin. 

I don’t remember how Paige and I found it, no doubt in one of our river maps, but we decided to go there and see if we could paddle up stream to this big rock area we could see on Google maps that was called Candiani bar. It was only about a mile or so up stream.  

At the time, we didn’t know what we might be getting ourselves into and the water was cold and running fast, so we put on our cold water emersion suits (so called dry suits) and struggled into our spray skirts and headed up the river. We started out on  River Right (The right side of the river going down stream and as it happens, the bank that San Salvador is on) and worked our way up river toward a little back eddy. The river was pretty strong there near the landing, but even stronger out in the middle of the river. The river was maybe 150 yards wide at this point. 

When you are paddling upstream in a big river like this, you need to go searching for the slow moving water. Often the water will be slower, perhaps half as fast, close to shore. There are lots of small obstructions, like down trees and underwater rocks, that divert the flow and create tiny back eddies that make the water near shore move more slowly. Of course, that water is also more shallow and you can run aground on those submerged tree trunks. 

that is a buzzard

A one day haul

This year we were about halfway to Candiani, we had just turned the corner and could see the tip of it, when we realized that we just were no longer making any headway. We had been forced away from the shore by a downed tree and the current was such 50 feet from shore that we were not making headway even though we were paddling as hard, or perhaps a little harder, than we could sustain. 

Across the way we could see a smaller and less inviting rock bar that we decided to cross to. If nothing else, we could pull up there and rest a bit. 

When you cross a big moving river like this, you want to get to the other side without being pushed downstream. You don’t want to lose the last 10 minutes of paddling in 1 minute of backward drift. That way lies insanity. So you use a maneuver called ferrying where you angle your boat at around 45 degrees to the current and cross with what you hope is a relative forward velocity of around zero. It is a strange experience, especially in water shallow enough to see the bottom. You have this sense of fast motion, with the river slushing around you, but the bottom below you is barely moving as you sort of slide sideways over to the far shore. 

We hunted rocks a little on that little bank, but it was pretty picked over and also covered in a thin patina of dried scum that makes it very hard to distinguish rock types.  However, the water was shallow and running slowly over there so we could make another hundred yards or so of progress up river toward our real destination. Just at the upward tip of the bar, the bank became very steep. Usually the land below water looks just like the land above water. So a steep side means deep water close to shore. Deep water often means fast moving so we once again were having a hard time progressing. We struggled on a few minutes until we thought were far enough upstream that we could make it to Candiani on the crossing. And then we crossed. This was another hard crossing with Paige in the lead but we did make it over to the shallow water near the Candiani Bar and from there we could manage to paddle upstream to where there was a good landing on the bar itself. 

Candiani Bar Circa 2015

 

Stick Stove Cooking... yum

Oh my, the rock hounding was incredible. We searched for an hour or so and both of us filled our bucket with agates larger than we had ever found. (It turns out we had never really found very large agates). Hunting for agates on the Willamette is different than hunting them on the beach. Beach agates tend to be much smaller, white, and rounded by surf. River agates come in white, red, and orange, and are usually found by their rough texture or by a very shiny edge caused by a recent (last hundred years?) cleaving of the rock. There were so many agates out on the bar that we were playing a little game where you could not move from the place you were standing until you had seen a agate and were going to that new place to pick it up. Often you would be seeing 2 or 3 and had to remember where they were as advancing. Because you are often seeing an agate from light reflecting off of a smooth edge, if you move a little you can lose sight of it. 

Immature Bald Eagles

Hunting Lambert Bar

The other bar we found is called lower Lambert Bar and is right at the outflow of the Lambert Slough, just across the river from the Lambert bend. Note the pattern here. If you look at a sattelite view you can clearly see this large fan of light colored area (rocks). Close you eyes and imagine how the river must have been flowing over that area to make that pattern. The rocks would have been rolling around with tree limbs, hell, entire trees, plowing through. All of the vegetation, even bushes and trees, would have been ripped out and small heavy things, like sand and pebbles, washed down in the flood. The last big flood we had was in 1996. I figure that is the last time this hunk of land had been truly stripped and turned and made ripe for rock hounding. So why did it wait more than 10 years for Paige and I to get there?

The section of river that Paige and I most like to run (partially due to convenience of location to our home) is from the ferry at Willamette Mission State Park to the take out at San Salvador. This is around 15 river miles and during that distance there are no bridges or public landings or anywhere that is easy for the public to access the river. There are lots of farms around and places where farmers kids can drink beer and have a party, but you can’t drive your city car up to the beach. Lambert Bar is even harder to get to and essentially inaccessible unless you have a fast boat or are willing to float 6 miles down to it and another 6 miles to get away from it. As you can tell from the picture, the bar has some growing trees on it. The upstream end is pretty well covered in dense foliage. But the downstream middle of the island was all exposed rock. Nothing growing there at all. And the rock was a nice size for finding big agates (say around golf ball size). The first time we stopped there we had just spent a half hour or so checking things out. But later that season we spent the night there in a little grassy area over on the river left bank. 

It was an idyllic and somewhat ironic scene. Here we were, the only people we could see for miles. Sitting on an island in a big scenic river. We had a little campfire going and we had our tent set up. This part of Oregon is blessed with a dearth of flying insects, so the nighttime wasn’t bad. Right next to our campsite was a growth of wild Himalayan blackberry. This plant is an exotic invasive in Oregon, but on this trip it supplied us with am ample bowl of berries for breakfast. We hunted rock in the revealing rays of the setting sun and we went for a swim when we got too hot. Pretty great.

Then around 8:00 at night, a band started playing. Somewhere, at some farmers home, someone was having a big party, perhaps a wedding. The music blared loud enough to keep us awake until around 2:00 in the morning. Ha !

We have found a lot of nice rocks on that island. Our most recent visit, however, found the interior of the island overgrown, much of it with the afore mentioned blackberry. The rocks are covered with grass and vine and the rock hunting isn’t so good. In fact, all of the little places that we used to go hunting in rock beds have pretty much been reclaimed by nature and covered in grass and brush. What is up?

I guess we are waiting for another flood of 1996. With the strange weather being caused by global climate change, I don’t think we will have too long to wait. And one must always be careful of what one hopes for.

We had a lot of rain and local flooding this year, but it didn’t come anywhere near to raising the Willamette to the flood levels of 1996. Paige lived here then and she told me of going down to the park that is near the confluence of the Willamette and the Clackamas and seeing the parking lot for the local McDonald’s flooded. That is a good 10 feet higher than the river was this year. That would certainly put some water over the top of Lambert bar. All of that quick moving water would tear out the blackberry and the grass and move rocks and trees through the area and plow things up good. 

It would also re-arrange the river. 

Even the water we had this winter changed things a lot. At the Candiani bar, there is an area sort of off of the main beach where in previous years there has been some good exposed rock. We walked back there last week and found that the water had flooded in and brought with it a load of sand, covering the rocky area we used to hunt. So the water is coming up and flooding things, it just isn’t moving with the force necessary to move rocks and bushes around. 

There is a new developing bar downstream from Lambert that I would like to check out. One of the things about floating the river is that you have to choose which direction you want to go around any island in the river. Do you choose the “main” channel or the “back” channel. I use quotes because sometimes it is hard to tell which is which. You make you choice and you ride your river. Lately we have been going around the back channel of Lambert because that is where (we think) the best camping spot is. That means we haven’t been getting access to the rock bar downstream on the Main channel side. Need to hunt that next time. Being ever optimistic.