Matt Young enters the Middlebury Gorge (Photo: Justin Beckwith)

It would be too easy to simply say the last few weeks of paddling in the Northeastern U.S. (as well as the entire East Coast) has been awesome!!  To say that it has been special, or unique would be a good start, but still far from doing justice to the absolutely incredible summertime paddling conditions we have recently experienced.  Flows seemed to be on the rise right after my teaching job in Lake Placid finished up for the year and only now, 3-weeks later our options for paddling seem to be dwindling.  I have been fortunate enough spend in both New York and Vermont this summer season logging runs on both sides of Lake Champlain with great friends.

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Its just over a year now since we put on our first section of the Gilgit river, and this got me reminiscing. Whilst it is conventionally run in spring or autumn when it is blue and has a boulder garden feel, at high water it takes on a completely different style. Its massive, swolen and silty, with big waves and rapids are often backed up one after another.

I had a look over the GoPro footage and realized there was tonnes of unused video so I put this together (a word of warning, if you don’t like naughty language skip to 15 seconds in):

Gerd wrote a nice summary of the event and a description of Kelly’s Whitewater Park in his post on June 25th, but I also wanted to share the Demshitz experience and competition results. Kelly’s is a phenomenal feature and the area and whitewater around cascade is outstanding!! Mr. Carbon Jed and Mrs. Jed kill it on the wave and the North Fork of the Payette stout section is not far downstream. Demshitz loves cascade Idaho!!

The feature is awesome because you can do both wave and hole moves. Dave was working really hard on getting his clean bunt mcnasty and got one during prelims with Mr. Carbon Jed. Craig’s clean blunts and airscrews were huge! Even Mike, who notoriously kills it in a hole, did wave moves in his comp rides and Bren can tricky-woo better than anybody else. Men’s scores were incredibly high in this freestyle event. Dave was really close to making semifinals with 1355 combined 2 rides, but barely missed the cut.

Craig, huge air blunt.

Men’s prelim results.

I made it to finals in the pro women’s and ended up taking 5th overall. In the last year I’ve gotten much more consistent with blunts and back blunts and it really helped at this feature. I even got a few compliments on how well I could blunt Mrs. Jed. That boat is amazing on a wave!! Rowan stepped it up and competed against the women but didn’t make the cut. The women’s division was competitive this year, even Clair O’Hara the current women’s world champion, came all the way from the UK.

Me surfing out to the green wave to set up for a trick.

Besides freestyle, there was also a combined downriver sprint and boater-cross event. The downriver sprint was mostly flat-water on the upper North Fork of the Payette and then finished in the park, and the boater-cross went right through the hole (causing some good carnage!). Rowan did really well in boater-cross taking 6th place in the Nano. Matt Anger took 4th in the downriver race and Craig was 2nd in the boater-cross.

Waiting to get on the bus for the downriver race.

The Payette River Games was one of my favorite events this year. I love the wave, hanging out in the park, and camping with everyone. One day we even brought the ping pong table outside and had an outdoor ping pong tournament and a BBQ….Demshitz style!!! It was a blast!! After the event we all got a little North Fork action and then parted ways. Now, it’s great to be back home in Idaho!!

With the Colorado freestyle circuit officially over it was time to pack the carbon Jeds away and say goodbye to their light weight feel, as we sack up and hike with creek boats to run some of Washingtons’ best white water.

We’ve been sessioning Icickle creek, Tum water and the top tye over the past few days,

Icickle creek was the most straight forward, Tum water has way bigger volume, with 2 big committing rapids known as “the wall” and “exit ramp”. We ran the wall on the first day and quickly found that the road lies and it was way bigger than we first anticipated, we had multiple lines down the rapid but everyone came through fine at the bottom. It took us a few more days to get round to doing exit ramp as it was difficult to scout the bottom where we had heard rumours of a stout hole. In the end myself, Dave Fussili and Erik Johnson fired it up,

Erik nailed the line,

Dave had a bit of a tumble in a hole at the top but came through and nailed the bottom

My skirt blew upon entry into the bottom hole …

Big thanks to all the boys (and girl) for saving my ass at the bottom.

As I write this we are rallying towards the Top Tye to hopefully run Log choke falls before packing up and heading north to Bc !

See you on the water,

Bren