Fall Low Water Creekin' on the Lower WindYou know every locale has one. It may not be the ideal run and you wish it would rain. The word is "when all else is too low go here," In West Virginia that place is Valley falls of the Tygart River. Here in the Columbia River Gorge we have Valley Falls on Steriods and that is called the Lower Wind River.
Much of this run is pretty tame and relaxed from top to bottom. In fact when the falls are "In" it is pretty damn boney. It is all about Shippard's falls on this run, and the best part of all is there is a 104 degree Hot Spring at the base of the last falls. Shippard's Falls is unrunnable throughout most of the year. In the 1960's the Fisheries department built a fish latter on river left to allow the Pacific Salmon to work their way up past Shippard's. Lucky for us Kayakers they also decided that the falls needed a sweet low head dam at the base too! You have to wait until the Wind River drops to it lowest level of the year before the low head dam is actually runnable. Running it at higher flows with be a death warrent unless you have a wicked boof stroke!!
The first major drop that you come to is the Flume. At higher flow this creates a gigantic haystack roller coaster but at todays flow this was a manky mess. It looks much easier than it actually is. Just to the right of where Jim is running the drop there is a pothole sieve that likes to eat boats. I was not fealing 100% confident on nailing my move so I opted to walk around and seal launch in on river right.
Immediately following the flume you run a nice chute through a hole called Beyond Limits. No pictures of this one, we just bombed through and prepered for more boney class II. After about another mile of this mank you reach Shippards Falls. Shippard's drops approximately 60 vertical feet in 4 drops! I could not get into position to take a phot of the entire series at once. This first shot is of the entrance falls. You can nail a sweet boof off of the river left flake by entering far right boofing left. Once you run this you go through a quick S-turn against the right bank and line up for waterfall number two.
For the second drop you simply take a couple of quick stokes to get into position at the lip, then wait for the late boof after sliding down 10 vertical feet down a 80 degree angle curtain. This one is very close to a 20 footer.
You can run drop number three pretty much anywhere you would like. The preffered line is about 5 feet off the right bank for a manktacular slide of about 25 feet. Or you can boof to you hearts desire down the left.
And finally comes the low head dam. You can actually nail a sweet boof off of this 8 footer!
Or, you can pencil and have some fun!
I could not include my pictures of the hot springs at this point because of excessive nudity. However, I can assure you that it was a boily 105 degree pool with some nice frosty Ranier's in had. What a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Immediately following the flume you run a nice chute through a hole called Beyond Limits. No pictures of this one, we just bombed through and prepered for more boney class II. After about another mile of this mank you reach Shippards Falls. Shippard's drops approximately 60 vertical feet in 4 drops! I could not get into position to take a phot of the entire series at once. This first shot is of the entrance falls. You can nail a sweet boof off of the river left flake by entering far right boofing left. Once you run this you go through a quick S-turn against the right bank and line up for waterfall number two.
I could not include my pictures of the hot springs at this point because of excessive nudity. However, I can assure you that it was a boily 105 degree pool with some nice frosty Ranier's in had. What a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
