Kayaking the Spring Flow at Willamette Falls

It is pretty wild that Portland has a nice set of Falls right in the city.  They are Falls of the Willamette and sit just a couple of miles upriver from downtown Portland in the neighboring town of Oregon City.  These are wide falls that encompass the entire  1500 feet of the Willamette right where an ancient lava flow made a narrow basalt canyon for the river and forced the 50 foot drop.

Lots of old industrial foundations near the Falls.

Back at the start of the 20th century, the power of the falls was too convenient to save its potential beauty and several industries that could rely on the water power were built on the cliffs just down river of the falls. These industries were not necessarily clean and the remnants of the old paper mill and Electric Generation facility are still in place. For a while the Falls generated all of the electricity for a growing Portland and powered the many electric railways that ran all over the area. There was one train that ran from Portland, along the East bank of the Willamette right up the cliffs of Oregon City to a flat spot above the falls. Passengers and goods could take this train to connect from river traffic on the Columbia to paddle boats that operated above the falls. This practice remained in use until the locks (which are still in place on the West bank of the river) were put in that allowed riverboats to bypass the falls. The locks are still there and presumably still work but have not been open in a decade or more due to National Parks funding issues.

Today the OOPS trip that I joined was going to travel the short distance from the Oregon City boat ramp to the base of the falls to play in the active water, rapids, and eddylines. I have been up to the falls area a couple of other times before but never when the water flow was so intense. I was very happy to have the OOPS experience and safety training going for me on this adventure.

We launched from the public boat ramp which is essentially right under the interstate bridge. They are doing a bunch of work to widen the bridge and add seismic enhancements. Because of the scale of the thing, there are a lot of temporary structures in the river to navigate. To make things even more fun, today was Memorial day and everyone with a boat was in line to use the ramp.  Park early, Park Often.

Sea Lion Traps

We paddled up the East side of the river, staying out of the way many fishermen. Along the way we passed a set of docks that I remembered as being occupied by a small colony of Sea Lions. Today those Sea lions have been replaced with large wire traps, presumably to catch said sea lions. What does one do once one has a few sea lions in large traps on floating docks?

There is the Falls!

Now we start to enter the narrowing part of the canyon and the current starts to pick up. On the left bank (River right, in this case) was a nice back eddy that let us glide peacefully upstream toward the falls, which were visible, big, and starting to get loud.

Steve, our lead TO, indicated that we should ferry across the current to the other side and hang out in the calm waters up against the cliff face. Now things began to get a little exciting. The current wasn't moving all that fast but it was really squirrelly. Currents going every which way with upwellings and whirlpools coming into being and dissipating.  I heard Lori give advice on this, she said something like, "Paddle the boat where it wants to go".  The boat is going to turn, you can't force your will on it suddenly. It is more of a negotiation. 

From our protected area looking across to the generation plant

Once across we came to a side current. Across the water, on the same bank as us but high up on the cliff is the old power generator. A significant channel of water is being diverted through the old system (and perhaps partially through the locks) and is coming down a big concrete shoot and gushing out into the main channel right in front of us. Steve selects this for warm ups. I suspect Steve wants to make sure he doesn't drown me on the first skill level. He gives us good concise directions and then heads into the swirling current, does a neat edge and brace and paddles his boat around and zips back into the relatively still water of the eddy behind us. Jerry goes next with similar results and then I follow. 

There is this thing about entering an eddy, which is the line between two sections of water moving in different directions. I am going to relate what I remember and felt, but for gods sake don't assume it is technically accurate.  I was told that the important things are some acronym that I can't remember but . Something like AMP?, Angle of attack, Momentum, and something really important that starts with P.  Perhaps don't in your dry suit?  Anyway, In I went. I do remember from previous lessons in eddyline crossings to Moon The Current. That is, edge your boat such that you face your bottom toward the current and brace on the opposite side (the side you are leaning toward). When your bow hits that current the water will build up on your upriver side and try to flip you over in that direction. Edging away from it gives it less to push on and gives you some lever arm to hold against the pressure. And then, Boom, the current pushes your bow down stream and your boat makes the turn and you are riding in the current. Keep Paddling. Paddling is effectively bracing.  Keep Paddling. You know, it is hard to paddle when you are petrified. Don't believe me? Google it.  

Part of my objectives on this trip was to raise my game a bit and enter conditions that I had not paddled before. I sure got a chance to do that. I entered that current 4 or 5 times and only almost went over once. (not sure how I didn't go over, truth told). The the team crossed the current and waited in the eddy on the other side up against the foundation of the generator.  Frak. Ok, I am coming. I got into the current and now paddled crosswise instead of letting it sweep me around. Right away I see a little problem. Up ahead this cross current hits the main current and there is this place where the two currents collide and it is very.... unsettled. Keep Paddling. It bumped me around. Once my boat went into a hole in the water and a wave came over the bow up to my skirt, but my new little boat didn't flip me out and I was quickly in the calm water of the eddy. Such excitement. I asked Steve how to get out of that confluence. He said "Oh yeah, I saw you in there. That is rough. I try to avoid that area".   Alrighty then.

I came back over with the team and then we did that again. This time Steve lead people into the main current for a bouncing ride down to calmer water. I had reached my limit, however, and everyone in the team had made it very clear that no one should do what they didn't feel comfortable doing. So I did what I had done before and crossed back into that downstream eddy by the cliffs and watched these experts play. They were fun to watch. 

Oh oh, that appears to be an upside down boat. I went after it, but Jerry had self rescued before I could get across the river to him. Man he was good. I wish I could self rescue that fast. I must practice that cause I didn't even KNOW you could self rescue in those swirly conditions. 

Later we were all sitting back over in the calm area near the cliff and talking and suddenly, Steve just flipped over. What? And then he flipped back up. And Lori flipped over. And back up, and Jerry flipped over and back up. Geeze, you could warn a guy your were doing rolling practice. I almost flipped over just to be funny. Of course, I would have stayed flipped over so that may not have been as funny as I would have hoped for. 

A little more fun. I got to do one rescue and then we were all a little pooped. We rafted up and had a very pleasant 10 or 15 minutes chatting and just floating down current while we all caught our breath and relaxed a little.

Did I mention what a wonderful sunny day it was. A terrific outing with terrific people. 

Adventures at Cove Palisades - Kayaking

 Cove Palisades State Park Camping and Kayaking

When you are driving on the main highway from Portland to Bend, you come down from Mount Hood and leave the forests and enter onto a vast flat rocky high desert. This dry region is covered in ancient flows of lava hundreds of feet thick and millions of years old. The top few feet may have some dirt and scrub pines and such, but the basalt flow lava rocks run deep. This deep rock isn’t something you would notice except for the few large rivers that cut across the high desert. The Deschutes, the Crooked, the Metolius, to name a few, have flowed across this desert for millenia and have cut deep narrow canyons through the relatively soft basalt lava flows. This means you are driving along with flat lands all around you; white topped mountains in the distance. Up ahead of you is something that looks like a bridge. You cross it and it is a bridge and you can see hundreds of feet down some canyon. The sign on the bridge says Crooked river, but you sure don’t see any river from the car, the canyon is just too deep.  Cove Palisades State park straddles two of those river canyons, The Crooked River and The Deschutes. The camping and recreation areas are halfway down the canyons on little plateaus, some of which used to be irrigated farm land. 

I have seen the signs pointing to Billy Chinook lake and The Cove Palisades state park, but I never realized it was so close to the main road (and Madras) or so different from the surround landscape. 

Across the canyon from our campsite

Mt Jefferson

Our little Scamp haven

My paddling club, OOPS (Oregon Ocean Paddling Society) is having one of their big summer events at this park. There are 40 or so of us and we have a bunch of campsites in F loop of the state park. It is a newer loop with very nice centrally located bathrooms and showers. Each shower/bathroom building also has a big sink setup for people to wash dishes. Every campsite in the F loop has power and water, but there are no sewer hookups available (there is a dump station, however). F loop is up high , say halfway up to the plateau and many afternoons around 2:00 or so the winds start to pick up and can really be howling by sundown. The first night we were here we made the mistake of leaving our sunshade extended from the Scamp and around midnight we thought it was going to tear itself right off of the side of the camper and so we had to go out and crank it shut. All of that noise from the wind in these big wooshing gusts; shaking the camper. Our puppy was not happy. She was scared and on constant alert. When you are not even a year old everything you do is still the first time. 

Because of this wind that often blows up in the afternoon, it is sort of important to get off the water by 2:00 or so. This means that the paddles are all morning paddles, some of them very early morning paddles. 

The OOPS club is a very organized and rules bound club. Their mission is to have high adventure in a safe and fun way. To this end, they have very organized paddle trips that have specific destination plans and a specific trip organizer who has the job of planning the trips and checking that the conditions are safe. For more advanced trips that means checking on tides, winds, weather, and temperatures. For paddling on this lake, it mainly means checking on the wind forecast. The wind forecasts up in the desert are not very exact so it also means planning for the wind and having bailout locations if things get dicey.  Though all of this planning and safety may seem a tad over the top for some paddles, it is practicing the safety in calm situations that makes them work when bad things happen.

We had two days of paddling with 3 or 4 different paddles each day. The paddles may go to the same location but they may leave at different times and have different leaders and leadership styles. The trip I went on Friday was a lovely paddle. It left from the day use area just down the canyon from our campground. I thought when I looked out from behind my campsite that I was sort of looking out to where the lake (Billy Chinook) is. I was right, but I didn’t realize that there is a shear cliff wall out there dropping down a few hundred feet to the lake. So you first have to follow the road along the cliff down that several hundred feet to where these is a boat launch, parking lot, and day use swimming beach.  We launched from the beach. There were 5 of us in this trip, all experienced paddlers. We went were starting on a part of the Lake Billy Chinook that is in the original canyon of the Crooked River.  The Crooked river is famous for a couple of things. First, it is the river that runs by Smith Rock, which is a lovely hiking area full of wonderful stone walls that are very popular to rock climbers. There are always a bunch there climbing when ever I visit. Second, the Crooked River Rim Rock area is where Tom McCall, the Governor of Oregon who sort of saved the Oregon State Parks, Public Beach, and Willamette river from ecologic destruction, was raised. That was a very long run-on sentence and I sort of forgot where I was going there. Glad you are still with me.

Crooked on Left. Deschutes on Right. "The Island" in middle

Anyway, We start off paddling “down stream” in this lake. The waters of the lake are very deep and they just a quarter of a mile from the launch the canyon walls are sheer on both banks all the way down to (and below) the water. This means you can paddle right up to the canyon wall and admire the basalt. Basalt has this tendency to form huge octagonal columns as it cools and there are many displays of this geology on the canyon wall. I hope they show up in some of the photos. 

About a mile down the lake/river is the historic confluence of the Deschutes river and the Crooked. Hard to tell what is going on in the lake unless you have a map (which we did) but we cross the lake at a narrow point and then head up the arm of the lake that is the historic Deschutes river canyon. More great rocks and extremely difficult places to get out and pee.  There was actually a floating bathroom in one little cove for the use of boaters. The platform was around 2 foot off the water, however, which is very hard to access from a kayak. A couple of our more skilled paddlers did show off by using the facilties. I pretended to be too interested in viewing the rocks. 

Around the corner a bit we came to the lower Deschutes day use area. Another nice boat launch and swimming area and a good example of a place we could have bailed if the weather got too bad. We would have had to call some club members for car help and that would have been embarrassing, but probably better than drowning or getting beached on the few rocks up against some cliff wall and then waiting all night for the wind to die down enough to allow a rescue. But instead of all that, we had no wind, almost no motor boats, and a very nice lunch on the beach. 

wha are these strange rocks in rocks?

On the paddle back I was admiring the deep water next to the canyon walls and thinking what a lovely place this would be for some rescue practice. Except, of course, that if something went wrong you wouldn’t be able to just walk out of the water. Perhaps the look was deceptive.

The club had 4 other paddle trips running at the same time. 3 of them left from the same place as my trip did. Then they would paddle different distances. One trip (the ones that did the longest mileage that day) paddled further downstream to the historic confluence of the Metolius river.  Then they paddled up to a place called Jasper Canyon, which sounds sort of cool. 

Another group launched and paddled on the Simtustus lake, which is the next dammed lake down from Billy Chinook. At that point the 3 rivers have combined and you just have one canyon. What I hear is that the canyon has very few places it is safe to get out and it isn’t legal to exit on the West shore of the lake because it is all tribal lands. 

See, now I have to go back on more trips just to go to all of these places. What fun.

<Coming Soon!! Guest Blog from Paige about paddling up the Deschutes>

We also did a few hikes around the region. But that is another entry.

Rory the Wonder Dog. (Oh, and "The Island")