Rogue River Repeats
When I first moved to Oregon I didn't make the trip down to the Wild & Scenic Rogue for quite a few years. I was busy with school, and then trying to start a practice. I was also quite pleased with how close Idaho is--for the whitewater paddler, there are few summer destinations more pleasing than Idaho. One time I applied for a Rogue permit in the lottery and got it, then gave it up because other things got in the way. Then, finally, I got on a summer trip down there and enjoyed it. On that trip I was rowing a "Clampitt" raft (stuff hanging off it all over) and following Pat's lines. This time I thought a lot about Nelbert, who died last week.
In recent years I've been doing at least one and sometimes more trips on the Rogue River, usually self-supported in a kayak. We make it a 3 night trip which is leisurely but does not leave time for layovers.
It's a 4 hour drive from home to the launch point at Almeda, so to save fuel we tried to combine a Rogue mission with our annual North Umpqua River trip, which is 3.5 hours south from here...but conditions didn't work out this year, with fires in the area and then an atmospheric river threatening to drown us in camp if we'd gone with our first pick dates. So we waited and tried again.
The second time was the charm. I had a long weekend held free from work (thanks Alex, you motivated me to hold these dates) and the weather promised to be sunny and warm. The forecast was for rain the last night, but that's OK because if you're taking out the next day it doesn't matter so much if your kit gets soggy. Then it didn't even rain.
Our crew shaped up nicely, with Bob, Bary and Alan joining Will and me. We filled the Ridgeline with 5 humans and 5 boats, drove down on a Thursday and launched. We've been using BLT shuttles and they are reliable and relatable.
We'd been on the water less than an hour when we saw a raft pinned in Argo rapid. It was mostly under water with very little gear still on board. Two people had just showed up on shore with ropes, intending to recover the raft. They were visiting from Moab where they boat on a relatively rockless section of the Colorado River, and had pinned it the day before.
Our crew of 5 spent the next hour helping them get a rope attached to the raft, and pulling on their Z-drag. We might have taken a different approach to getting the raft off if it had been our raft, but as it was we were simply assisting. It looked to us like it would have come off more easily with a pull from the other side of the river---but that was a larger distance, and there were no obvious anchors over there. Funny how the presence of just one usable anchor can cause people to pull in the wrong direction. I think you'd call it the "availability heuristic". The "ten boyscouts" method of simply pulling with human muscle and experimenting with different angles might have succeeded in unpinning the boat, but the pair had already picked the anchor and were intent on using it.
We felt bad for them but wouldn't let their misfortune ruin our trip too, so we left them in the late afternoon with the boat still stuck. In the next section of river we found where someone had emptied one of their drybags leaving most of the contents on a rock, and taking the bag. Being fully loaded with small boats, we could not transport any more gear.
We camped under the twice-curved bridge at Grave Creek, just upstream from the official access point at the beginning of the Wild & Scenic section. Currently everyone is launching at Almeda or higher because the road to Grave is closed. We will probably never camp there again but enjoyed the quiet. Bonus: the pit toilet is unlocked and stocked.
The next morning at First Stop Beach someone had thrown a bunch more gear from the pinned raft up on shore including an aluminum box with helmets dangling from it, a paco pad and another drybag which had not been pilfered.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, except that at our last two camps we were berated by a rafter who thought we should not have taken the camps we did. If we'd been parked there with 5 rafts they'd have not thought we were being inappropriate, but our minimalist gear somehow lowers our status. We passed up plenty of large camps. This same crew was friendly on our last day, offering breakfast burritos, and Bary was trusting enough to accept one. Perhaps they felt bad about their creep yelling at us.
We would gladly share camp with a pleasant smaller group, but drunken groups with foul shouting and boom boxes are not welcome. I would prefer to have a cooperative camp selection process, but if it must be competitive, I too can play that way.
Camp running is normal on the Rogue. It's considered bad manners elsewhere, and still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Commercial trips started it, running one boat ahead to set up lunch, and then again to nab camp. Private trips have adopted the same strategy. One guilty-looking pair on a raft at Lower Solitude were just waiting for us to berate them for camp running, but we didn't. That's just how it's done on the Rogue.
Dee told me that if you don't have a decent camp by 2pm, all bets are off. Having been on the losing end of the bargain too many times, we don't play nice anymore. In hardshells we can pass raft trips, so we launch early, jet ahead and take a nice camp. The good news is that I keep adding new campsites to my "mile by mile" list and there are quite a few that are not on the maps.
The rapids were not hard for our compact crew. I've learned the easiest lines from paddling with canoes, and was happy to just float down the river keeping it chill. Bob was actually looking for more excitement, and Alan surfed much less than he normally does. Grave Creek Falls is mellow if you hang left, the Fish Ladder is bony at 1270 CFS but not dangerous, Mule Creek Canyon had a nice long lull in the middle and didn't seem as boily as it sometimes does, and Blossom was pure fun with great eddies and moves to make the whole way down.
Someone died at Wildcat this fall. He was a rafter from Colorado who got his boat stuck on the rocks. He stepped out of his raft to get his raft free, fell in the river and got stuck under water. His body was in there for the rest of that day and the next, until a rescue team managed to pull him out, but then they lost the body. When we launched we didn't know if the body had been found but it was, 11 days after it was lost. He was only 49 years old.
The pumpkin situation is serious. There is a tradition on the Rogue of placing pumpkins on the rocks during the month of October. The BLM would like people to stop doing this, because it provides an unnatural food source for the wildlife, and because sometimes the pumpkin seeds germinate and introduce yet another invasive plant to the ecosystem. But it's hard to beat back a tradition like this. In Blossom there were quite a few larger pumpkins with sharpie writing on them, placed high enough that we couldn't knock them down from a kayak. We did remove many of the smaller ones, and we saw people in rafts also removing them. The environmentalists and government are working against tradition. This is another facet of the culture war, set on a river.
We enjoyed our campfires every night--sort of. On a kayak self-support trip you don't really have room for a firepan. Instead, Bary brought a Hobo Pot, a compact campfire replacement. He made it by packing a roll of corrugated cardboard into a steel food can and saturating it with parrafin. While it's burning you feed it by adding chunks of candle wax. We enjoyed the tiny fire every night as darkness set in and now we're all going to make them. It's a relatively stinkless contraption that is small, the fuel is waterproof, spill-proof and multipurpose (you can use it on your drysuit zipper or your paddle), and there's something mesmerizing about fire.
At the takeout we were loaded up and headed out in 30 minutes time, leaving the rafters futzing with their long derigging process. This is one of the best things about going minimalist. The first hour of the drive home from Foster Bar is lovely, up over a pass and into the East Fork Coquille drainage, and down to Powers. I'd like to spend more time in that part of the state.
The Rogue was one of the first Wild & Scenic designated rivers, and it remains a gem in spite of the overabundance of humans and black bears. Madrones with their gorgeous trunks stand out from the scrub oak forests, and there isn't much poison ivy. The water is alive with fish, aquatic insects and otters, and the sky soars with eagles, egrets and great blue herons. The deer and other wild creatures are abundant and work around all the private land inholdings. On this trip especially my eyes were feeding on the fall colors. How lovely. We are lucky to have such easy access to the Rogue.