Could I talk someone into going up and running Thunder creek.

My wife and I are tossing around camping options for a family trip and this was one of those zones that popped into my mind as a possible compromise of family time with a quick dadventure.

Only thing is I don't want to be the one to hike 4 miles to find out the run still sucks, so could someone please go do all the leg work for me. If you are willing I will provide the beta and a machete so you can clear the devils club out which would be helpful. Then as an added bonus you can come back and do it again with me once we nail down a date that is going to work.

I was out there last weekend hiking and it was pumping!!!

A couple of clarifying responses from the core boaters would probably be in order:

Did you see any other wood that may require portaging, particularly at lower flows?

When you say a little pushy, do you mean that you could see rocks or just water?

I think we made two portages due to wood. The first was chopstix because the bottom log was at river level. The second was(I believe) the drop above dim sum. It has wood clogging the left side which looks like it would be a sweet 8ft boof. It also has wood clogging a pocket on the far right of the run out that it looked like you could be pushed into if you ran the main channel. I saw this clogged pocket two years ago in a low water run down and on this most recent trip it looked like it was still there. We portaged left.

I could see the tops of big boulders but it was mostly just water. I would say that the flow info provided in the write up was spot on. For ruff comparison I would say it felt like robe at 6ft as opposed to robe at 5ft.Looking at the recent graph I think we were in there the day it was spiking and pretty sure when we got off it was 1000-1100

Two years ago I made a run at the min flow. We over hiked the trail and put in on the double drop ledge listed on the run description. That went great, we then ran the next slide rapid without problem. It has a log at the bottom but you could duck it reasonably. From there I just remember a junked out slide with some wood and big boulders in it that we portaged right. Then the flumy style rapid that I believe is the normal put in. We ran that on both trips. I don't think we saw the mega drops above the put in. Ive only done this run in the past two years and it had not changed in that time.I think Grafton had done it 4 years ago and he did not mention any major changes.

I tried to insert a pic of the drop with wood, but cant figure it out. In my albums it name is DSC03173-crop.jpg

Edited by smcboating - 25 Jul 2013 at 11:53pm