Lake Creek, Deadwood Creek to Tide

I've been remiss at posting my latest kayak adventures. I've managed to squeeze in a trip every weekend for the past month! The first paddle this year was on Lake Creek, which drains Triangle Lake down to the Siuslaw River.  A class III/IV run at higher levels - we got lucky and caught it with 6' on the gauge, a minimal II/III run. Still, it's a challenging run with lots of ledges and boulders. I swam twice and managed to finally hit the combat roll when I needed it. There is one set of famous rapids called, "The Horn". 

Here's a pic of the class III rapid, "The Horn". It's hard to see all the whitewater that precedes this coup de grace. The turbulent flow forces you into a chute and propels you, mostly uncontrolled, through the end of the rapid.

Classic coastal Oregon shot: kayakers, rough water, steep slopes and clouds above.

Kim in the foreground and me in the background with the yellow pfd. Note the snow.

And more snow. Water temp is ~50 and the air is freezing. Swimming on this run was not the most fun.

Ahhh, sunshine. It peeped out for a while and melted some of the snow.

Captain America color scheme and I'm not even the most colorful on the river!

The hardest part about getting pics on these runs is that we only use the camera in flat water (for obvious reasons). Lennie took all of these pics and managed to get this one in semi-white conditions. Really though, we didn't get pics of all the gnarly rapids we ran.

An Excavator Proves its Might

My brother sent me this email forward and it was so cool I decided to post it here. What follows are a series of pics of a tower constructed to show off the power of an excavator. The final caption below the pics read, "Whatever the operator of this machine gets paid, its not enough!".

Pool Session Roll Practice

OSU lets the kayakers use their pool to practice rolls one night a week. Don't worry Mom, my roll has gotten a lot better since this:

Sampling Round Three, Final Round?

Completed what will hopefully be my last round of sampling on the Willamette. It required 5 days of driving all over the watershed and sampling from bridges. I did get to ride in a snow-cat though, definitely a highlight. I'll upload pics tomorrow, lost the camera cord again.

Confluence of two streams in the northwest corner of the Willamette River watershed

Beaverton Creek in Portland, an urban stream. It's been partially re-routed and completely re-channeled for urban development. All the white tubes are an attempt at revegetating the streambanks (this is at low-medium flow, during high flow it'll go half-way up the bank)

And here's the might Snow Cat! I took a ride in it to sample the upper most streams at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest. There was a couple meters of snow at the higher elevations and you could only reach the streams with a snowmobile or Snow Cat. I went with the heated ride, complete with GPS nav and a radio/CD player. And I made a video:

La Conga Challenge 2009

The La Conga Challenge is an annual 'foot race' with a growing number of followers in the Corvallis region. Well, not that many but they're all my friends and that's all that counts. The race consists of the following:

1 tall boy PBR

0.5 km race

1 La Conga burrito

0.5 km return

1 tall boy PBR

If you puke then you get two minutes off your time...

First one back is the champion and is usually awarded a priceless heirloom like something purchased earlier that day from Goodwill. It's mostly for the glory that my fellow grads train and compete. 

This year I played the role of videographer rather than competitor: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOvMVAlmBMY

Philomath Disc Golf

A brief respite from the normally drizzly weather of winter Oregon has provide the opportunity to further procrastinate writing of a thesis and enjoy my favorite leisure activity: Disc Golf. Yes, probably not the coolest thing I've ever admitted to but I don't care. These series of pics are from a new course that just opened nearby, in the clearcut capital of Oregon, Philomath. It's a 9-hole, most are 18, but some of the holes are very challenging and there is a lot of water to lose discs...

One of the many backwater areas alongside the Mary's River, where the course is laid out.

That big log is a legacy of the clearcutting days when Philomath was held in higher regard and the town's economy boomed. The log is shaped into a bench now - I didn't count the rings but it's probably an old-growth Douglas Fir (300 + years).

Lea loves to have her picture taken. That miscreant coyote in the background is Marlowe.

Mt. Bachelor and Sun River Fun

Headed to the mountains for some winter fun this past weekend. A group of us organized a trip to Sun River, a resort town near Bend in eastern Oregon with easy access to plenty of Sno-Parks (parking turnouts along the main roads that provide access to the abundant national forest lands in the area). Sun River is only a 30 minute drive to Mount Bachelor for the hardy downhillers in our group, though icy conditions this weekend made for a rough time on the slopes. 

Conditions for cross-country skiing proved to be icy as well,  I broke a pole on a downhill section at Swampy Lake Sno-Park area. The trail had morphed into two toboggan-like troughs that were completely iced. Directional and velocity control were impossible and I snapped my ski pole in half trying to slow my accelerating descent. After a few nasty crashes and narrowly missed collisions with the native Ponderosa pine, I called it a day and decided to stick with snow-shoes...

Even without the ski option we managed a fun time between copious amounts of food and beverage as well as the obligatory hot tub at our Sun River rental. 

Below are pics from a hike at Tumalo Creek, a municipal source of water for Bend, Oregon. 

Tumalo Falls, from the trail.

Tumalo Falls, looking down from the top. ~ 100 ft.

Tumalo Creek