I'm down in CA right now and got invited on a run on the upper Carmel River yesterday. The fellow that invited me was Bill Tuthill from California Creeks, a cool site about California Rivers (link below). Bill had a couple of friends in Carmel Valley to paddle with so off I went to meet everyone for the first time. Included in the crew was Denise, our shuttle driver, a woman I had briefly and barely known in high school in the early '70's.

 

Note to Brian Vogt: Bill says hi and speaks very highly of you!

 

To make this very long story short, we drove miles up this windy road into the upper reaches of Carmel Valley. Our destination was the tiny community of Cachagua, by the dam where we were to put it. As we drove through this very remote and somewhat trashy trailer park I made the comment "Welcome to Methamphetamine Flats".... Turns out Denise has lived there for 22 years and one of the paddlers grew up there...

 

Fortunately they all had good senses of humor and let me off the hook, after a good ribbing of course. Denise said something about hoping it was another 35 years until we met again.

 

By the way, this run is half fun / half suffer fest. The first 3 miles are low volume creeky style class III (yeah, I know, I don't think of class III as creeking either but that's the best description). Then there is a short gorge with a couple of fun III+ rapids followed by a couple of miles of brush infested, shallow river bed. The run lies between two dams and is de-watered most of the time, resulting in all the brush. It wasn't too dangerous as flows were pretty low but higher water could have led to some scary entanglements.

 

Although I liked it, I wouldn't recommend it. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of runs nearby. Guess I'm spoiled from living in Seattle for so long. There is good surfing on the CA central coast however, if you don't mind sharing the water with "the man in the grey suit" *.

 

 

*  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_white_shark