Winter Long Boating

We been working on our old school tricks.

Check it out:

Middle and Lower Cullasaja

It had rained on thursday night and I was dying to get back in my creekboat. I had classes all day friday so skipping school was out. I gave Adam Secrest a call on friday evening to see if he was going to be boating the next day. He gave me Eli Smith's number so we could carpool from Asheville. I woke up early and made it over to Eli's house just in time...to wake him up! We got rallied within an hour and were ready to hit the road. Predictably, we made a wrong turn and didn't figure it out for a while, delaying us another 40 or so minuted. We ended being about 1.5 hours late on a 1.5 hour drive. Funny stuff. Luckily, Adam and the crew he was with were really late too.
All together we were 7, rollin' pretty deep. I guess it was Mac McGee, Adam Seacrest, Eli Smith, Daniel Stewart, Jon Angermeier, Isaiah Stunna'shades and I. In the interest of time, we decided to skip the upper section. Defenitly a good decision. The middle section was nice, but it had a good bit of flatwater.
There were a few good rapids on that section, but nothing too spectacular. We all took a nice long look at Superslide which is visible as the big bunch of white at the top of the pic of Cullasaja falls. It is a super cool slide with a big kicker boof at the bottom. If anything went wrong though, you would be attempting a first decent on a big drop that lands on rock. Super Slide is pictured below and at the top of the picture of Cullasaja Falls. With such a fast moving pool we all decided to walk it (some more happily than others though).
After hiking around Cullasaja Falls we put back onto what looked like a totally different river. There were tons of perfectly clean drops. Naw, just kidding. It was probably one of the mankiest looking low volume rivers I have ever done. All the rocks were sharp and irregular. To quote Leland Davis, "What this river lacks in length it makes up for in mank." On the first drop, we had to use the german technique of "duck-an-boof". Mac is pictures below about to make the second boof in the sequence.
After that rapid, we came up to Eclipse and Next Time. Eclipse got its name because it eclipses Sunshine, a known class V+, in difficulty. It is a pretty legit section of whitewater, Both of those rapids are pretty stout. None of us were on our game and high water might clean up the drops some so we carried around those two. We continued on through the mess of sieves, caves, undercuts, machete rocks and strainers until we got to the end. As we were all talking about the possibilities of Superslide, Next Time and Eclipse at the take-out, Eli announced that he hated the river and he would never do it again. I think people in this area are pretty lucky because there are so many other great runs in the area that they can write off rivers as fun as the Cullasaja and still have a bunch of creeks to paddle. I will be back; however, to Eli's credit the Cullasaja isn't very popular anymore.

Nathan

P.S. Adam made a post on his blog and has a cool little video up.
http://tengallonhats.blogspot.com/2008/02/cullasaja-we-had-some-logistical-issues.html