Cascade River First Descent

I’ve never been past Concrete up Highway 20 in spite of living in the Northwest for 10 years now. Nope, never done the “Cascade Loop” although I’m sure I’ve driven parts of it. Having been focused more on riding ocean waves, I rarely headed east except to snowboard.

Last July I started riverboarding more than bodyboarding, taking a plunge off a 20’ cliff into the White Salmon for my first ever race during the Gorge Games. In spite of jumping in almost last, I ended up 5th in the race out of about 20 competitors.

One year later I’m finding myself wanting to experience more and more challenging whitewater. While this progression needs to be evaluated at every river, I’ve been in enough rivers now to assess my limits.

I’d been chatting with a guy named John about the Cascade River who is in a Thursday night Nooksak paddle group up in Bellingham, and he thought it would definitely be runnable on a riverboard. He’s also seen me navigate Bench Drop and SAT several times and knows my skills. When Franz organized an informal trip to the Cascade, another Thursday night kayaker and I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately the kayaker had too much going on that day, and I was on my own with 9 cat boaters who had never seen me riverboard.

Franz, Johanna and I hiked down from the road to the Bridge Drop rapid early Saturday morning to scope it out. River wide holes, a decent gradient and lots of rocks requiring quick maneuvers all made it live up to its class V rating. And although there is one eddy just above the rapid, catching it isn’t guaranteed, as you are just coming out of Starts with a Bang. The old lookout bridge that had plagued the river for over 20 years was mostly removed but who knows if a stray piece of rebar is still waiting below the surface. Franz built a cairn there to honor a friend who had drowned in the mess.

I figured I’d be faster than the cat boats, but this was only true in the rapids. I thought I’d left enough distance between myself and another boater on Starts with a Bang, but after the third drop I found myself face to face with a blue pontoon and scrambled toward the right to avoid going under it. I managed to get around it, and moving right had allowed me to catch the eddy before Bridge. I watched how the others navigated through the maze of rocks and holes and decided on my line, and my backup line. I made it through using Plan A without any trouble, and this seemed to assuage the cat boaters fears that I might be a liability.

The read-and-run sections in between the class Vs don’t let you relax very much. Sometimes shallow, sometimes not: constant rocks and wood and spillovers and drops.

Premium was a hoot, but the next challenge was called Monster. It’s ugly and kind of mean, but if you can deal with the ledge in the middle, you’re golden. I avoided the ledge in the middle by squeezing between it and the cliff on the right, a luxury the cat boats don’t have. Afterwards I hugged the eddy on the right and was almost getting pushed up into the wall, but found a nice slot to bump my way down to the bottom, getting worked in a hole somewhere along the way. It wasn’t real pretty, but it worked well enough, although I felt a bit worked myself. Monster had given me more trouble than Bridge Drop! Adrenalin pumping, I accepted a hard lemonade and tried to enjoy the spectacularly scenic waterfall behind us where we lunched at the bottom.

Shelly had told me to get to the right of the “shark’s tooth” rock, which required a perpendicular ferry that I somehow mustered. It’s a blind horizon and was I in for a ride! It was a long slide into a pool of froth. It would have made for some awesome helmet camera footage if only the thing had been working. What I didn’t realize about the Go Pro Hero is that if your battery is low, it will turn on, and start recording, and even save your recording, all 30 seconds of it. It shuts off to conserve power with no warning! Bah!

Just after that last set of whitewater, we spotted a man on the side of the river and Franz, Drew and I stopped for a chat. He offered us beers. Does it get any better?

I have to add that if you’re ever in Marblemount, be sure to dine at the Bull Run; they have awesome game burgers including elk. It’s the place next to the Shell station.

Because of the helmet camera failure, in part, I decided to run it again on Sunday, in spit of being more tired than I liked. Only Franz and Morgan stayed to cat boat it again, but three of my Thursday night group showed up with kayaks, including John. John and Devan portaged Bridge. I missed the eddy, missed my turn before the middle rock, got worked in a hole, pushed hard river left, got hung up on a rock, and ended up with some very embarrassing helmet camera footage.

On the bright side, I took a better line through Monster, even though I got a little hung up on the middle ledge and worked in the hole below it. I missed getting to the high side of the Shark’s Tooth rock and bumped my way over to the right just below it, to find myself plunging over a small waterfall! Many, many ways down this section. Although fatigue had kept me from getting the lines I’d wanted, it was another successful run on the Cascade.

Back at the Bull Run for a late afternoon lunch, Shane Turnbull of Chinook Expeditions stopped in and dined with us. Someone mentioned to him I’d riverboarded the Cascade.

“You SWAM that?”

Um, sure. But I prefer the term “riverboard.”