Fearless Leader Dunbar
All you ever hear about Lime Creek is "adrenaline falls". I have heard about, and seen video of people crashing, scraping paddles, getting worked up against the wall, going deep, and all that stuff for years. I haven't heard about another rapid in that first gorge before.
The other thing that I had heard is that the run is kind of boney at the top of the run. That you have to get through a little gravely bumpy stuff to get down into the gorge where the river narrows up and gets good. There was one problem there was no boney part. We put in on very very fast moving water with almost no eddies. Dunbar gave us the appearance that all was good but I wasn't convinced. Jennifer was gung ho but anxious, and Dunbar wasn't showing any signs that he was nervous so I just went with it. It all seemed good.
The first sign that the water was higher than Dunbar was used to was that he didn't exactly know where each rapid was coming up. "Okay so the next rapid is a couple turns down there should be an eddie on the left no worries". We would then float around a couple turns and then a couple more and then we would all scramble for a tree to grab onto, get the beta, and then run the drop it was all going smoothly but it just seemed not quite 100% right.
As we approached Adrenaline Jenn was getting nervous. The tree branch eddies were working but it just wasn't normal. The approach went great and we got the eddie and started to go scout the drop and I was feeling pretty good and excited about it so I was looking closely Jenn and Dunbar had decided to carry, and I was walking up to run it when a guy comes walking down the hill from above yelling at Dunbar, "Dude, I ran that yesterday and pretty much saw god. My friends said that I went deep in my kayak like 10 seconds got pushed against he wall, then I swam and then I went 35-40 seconds deep. I saw god, dude, I wouldn't do it. So that kind of blew my voodoo to run it. Can't say I wasn't glad to have some of that pressure off. As it turned out the guy had lost his boat and we found it in the next drop downstream. We dumped it out and pulled it up on shore, and then headed downstream.
Jennifer S-Turn
The only two that were of concern left were S-Turn and Dragons Back. We caught the eddies above S-Turn and I scouted from river left. Looking down in there all I could see was super boily water pushing through against a big pillow and then forcing through a slot to the left of the boil. It was a messy cauldron but it all went through so the beta was go left through the pillow and hang on. Dunbar went first and made the move left of the pillow and then the boils sunk him down almost to the armpits and then spit him through the next slot and into the eddie below. All good signal came from behind the rock and Jenn and I followed no problem, but pretty much it was a hang on type rapid, and roll up at the bottom. It was really fun.
Next came Dragons Back. The hole looked okay but if you messed it up at all you were going to typewriter back into a gnarly pit and definitely swim and the swim didn't really look like you would come out of the hole for sure so we did the Huck and Jump technique.
Ancient Huck, Jump, and Swim Technique
After that it was a run out to the take out. Super fun but a little high to take advantage of the runs potential.
The video is a little big. 22MB
but pretty funny.
Peaks at the Takeout
Lime Creek, Click It
