North Fork Clackamas: Waterfall Mission

The N.F. Clack is a serious little mission with constantly changing wood and numerous portages. Fingers crossed that there will be a good flow, the fun starts with a 1/4 mile hike down hill to the put-in. Once you get to the creek and the level is of a barely kayak floatable nature you know you’re in for a fun day with sections of continuous class 4 boating, the option to run 2 class 5 drops and a few strenuous mandatory portages. The big portage is around the un-run 40’+ waterfall, which was our goal to run on this particular trip. I was happy to see the trip come together, as the NF is very hard to catch with water, and I was just in the area for a short period of time in order to be at the Allen De Mayo event. I was also lucky enough to catch my favorite PNW creek, Trout Creek, for the 2 days prior to the NF mission.

Our solid NF Clack crew consisted of Ryan Scott, Joe Stumpfel, Tony Skiv and myself. Ryan had been into this river a few times and Tony and I had paddled it together a few years ago. Joe was the only NF virgin, but he is such a solid boater you don’t really worry about him on a new run. The level was of a low medium nature, which should have been great for making the move left on the big drop. The fun lead-in rapids went by in a blur as we rolled up to Speed Trap, the 10′ falls that drops you into the gorge for the big one. Sadly the Speed Trap had a big log right across the normally run line, center right. Joe was the only one to sack up for this drop and stomped it with his mad C-1 style. It was “runnable” in a K-1, but it would have been REALLY hard to get a boof stroke at the lip after ducking the moving log. As we all walked up to the lip of the big falls, with breaths held, we quickly realized that things had changed and it wasn’t going to be run on this day. A massive clearcut just upstream of the drop on river right has caused some serious erosion to drop rocks and debris into the drop, essentially at the lip of the falls. The lip of the falls now has a divider rock in the middle splitting the water into two channels. The right channel dropping directly onto exposed rock and the left channel, with barely any water, dropping to non aerated water of questionable depth. After some quick video and photo action to document the disappointment we did the strenuous portage, re-entering the creek just below the falls in order to get more photo and video. This is the HARD way to portage this gorge! Easy way is to take out just above Speed Bump and hike downstream on river left high on the hill-side until you see the creek again. We rallied the rest of the creek with all the “fun” wood portages near the bottom and the quick reservoir paddle to the take-out. Super fun day, but disappointing that the falls is now a MANDATORY portage.