Best Packrafting Video of the Year: Luc's edit of Paul on Bird

Luc Mehl's latest and best creation highlights his skills as cameraman/editor, Paul Schauer's as superb boatman, and the Alpacka packraft as a forgiving, fun craft:



Paul's season highlights is also so well crafted that I'd like to take up hardshelling, too:

End of the season?

Tim Johnson continues to lead Luc Mehl and me down ever steepening creeks: Magic Mile, Upper Willow, and, this past weekend, Upper-Upper Bird and its handful of stout drops, namely "Walls of Jehrico", a "20 foot" waterfall.

Several interesting things occurred: first Luc wants to turn to the "hard side" -- not to give up on packrafting, but rather to improve his technique, to "paddle like Timmy and Paul and", he adds, "to go down easy rivers with my friends who are just getting started in packrafting."

Second, four of us piled on Tim's 4-wheeler to drive the four miles to Upper-Upper Bird. This seemed pretty weird, riding an ATV to go packrafting, instead of walking.

Third we worked on the first rapid, "Cave Man", like rock jocks on a boulder problem. We kept getting flipped (we being Luc and me -- not Timmy) at the cave wall at the bottom of the drop. Tony Perelli watched us closely, then took his turn and made the drop, hit he cave wall bow-on, bounced off and paddled away. Luc and I were able to replicate this technique and so move on to "Walls of Jehrico," the big drop.

After Caribou Creeks' drowned "Skyscraper Falls" this is one of the cleanest drops around. We studied it and decided that we could drop off its right side and the "horn mid way down we won't even feel." I was not so sure and planned to miss it.

First Tim and then Tony hit the horn and both face planted as the horn caught the boat bottoms and slowed them. Luc, going third, was intent on making a good roll in the pool below (he's been hitting his combat rolls consistently in Six Mile), but instead made a fantastic boof that cleared him of the horn, sticking the huck and sending his fist upward in glory.

Next, we came to the another waterfall, "Inside Out", which was too bony for us to run. The plunge pool was great but the entry slot was narrow and overhung. We three packrafters jumped into the pool feet first, then Tim, the kayaker, folded up his butt-boat and anounced he would be late for his date if he didn't leave. So he walked to his 4-wheeler while we finished the run, a run too bony for fun, exhausting, frustrating and slow

It wasn't just scrape-y but bang-y as we hit our paddles on the rocks in six inch of water for the next couple miles and what seemed like hours.

Luc said, "If I've learned one thing, it's always do what Timmy does: if he takes a line on a waterfall, take it. If he walks around a drop, walk around it. If he leaves the river with his boat rolled up, leave the river. He's always right."

Bird Carnage and Honey Sweet Upper Willow

It's Bird season -- low water and warmer down on the arm in the hemlocks and Sitka spruce. Took my son Roman and Todd Tumolo and Matt Johnson down to do the long version of Bird Creek. Be sure to take the second left after the wooden trail marker about 45 minutes in from the parking....not the first left after that wooden trail marker. We had sunshine and carnage at the Center Falls. Matt came up with a great name for the drop after Center Falls -- "Bird Cage" -- as anyone who's got grabbed at the stern in low water can appreciate. His video offers up good low water names for the series of rapids below Mushroom: "Bird Brain", "Chicken Wing", "Whirly Bird", Center Falls and "Bird Cage". I'd stick one more name in there for the ledges above "Whirly Bird" -- "Breast Meat"?

That canyon has become quite the packrafting scene -- there are about six or seven You Tube videos on just Bird (OK, well two are mine) and for good reason.

On Friday I tried out the BayLee 1 by FeatherCraft on Bird. It comes thigh strap ready and with two chambers feels oh-so-safe compared to a single chamber should you cut your boat and go flat midstream with thigh straps tight and four inches of velcro holding your skirt shut....anybody who wants to downsize from an inflatable kayak (IK) to a packraft will absolutely love this 9 lb (w/straps) boat. It paddles more like an IK than an Alpacka and has two chambers and solid fabric. Rafters will appreciate its conventional valves. The seat is well forward and the spray deck surprisingly dry for version 1.0, seem like. Pulls up high on the chest and actually stays there. It's like Feathecraft has been reading the Alpacka Forum and blogs like this and listening....but for me, I still prefer the nimble cut of an Alpacka Raft even if the Alpacka needs some further mods to make it suitable for Class IV.



So when Timmy J, Luc, Tony Pirelli and I went to paddle Upper Willow, I took my trusty Super Llama.

That was the best day of boating this year, with uncountable big drops and filler that felt like Little Su's main events. I emailed Brad, "If Magic Mile is Little Su on steroids, then Upper Willow is Ship Creek on crack." It was an icy day with frost on the walk-in and verglas on the boulders, but my hands stayed warm under the influence of "A", that natural high substance we all crave.

I shot some video but it doesn't do the magnificence of the canyon any justice. Nor did I capture the intensity of the drops. The boogy water is basically like Bird Creek canyon rapids and the big drops, the ones with names, are like nothing I'd ever done in Alaska -- more like a mini version of the Upper Hokitika Canyon, challenging, committing, and often sievy. The longest rapid "Sieve 57" was wild and finished with a big juiced up version of Commando Drop, twice as high and following a bunch of linked Six Mile Staircase like drops. WILD!

The Triple Drop portage on the right was an adventure. We had to get into our boats from a cliffside and I got surfed in a mini-hole, fell out and almost got pulled into a sieve there until I pushed my boat into a channel and held-on head first down a narrow slot to keep from touring Elvis' Graceland North.

Elsewhere and in other news, I feel like I learned to boof-lite (not full on, but getting there).

In 2009 Thai Verzone said of Montana Creek, "Last year, we'd never have dreamed of doing this." This year I never dreamed that I'd finish the legendary Upper Willow two weeks after Magic Mile and grinning ear to ear with Luc, who said, "I didn't think it could get better than Magic Mile -- I can't wait until next week to do this again."

Luc, Tony, and I bought Tim dinner and a tank of gas in thanks for taking us down -- we ran everything but Aqualung and Triple Drop and landed it all with big fat smiles on our faces.

News Flash: Let the Revolution Begin.

We know that packrafts are real boats. The main problem has been that we users have not been seen as

real boaters.

Packrafts have been perceived as boats for people who can’t roll.

Until now.

Tim Johnson, author of Alaska Whitewater, bought a used packraft last week and did what we all want to do: he rolled it for real!

An Eskimo roll, twice, in Bird Creek with ice in the water and icicles on the cliffs.

This changes everything.

Anyone up for pool practice?

NB naysayers and armchair designers: The key were the bomber thigh straps he put in the boat.

Flipping Bird

Bird Creek had a reputation: unrunnable falls, death wood. But as with so many creeks and rivers with reps, only a run can display the reality.

In Bird's case the reality surpassed expectation. Sure there're the "Mushroom", "Entrance", and Bird Falls that look bad for packrafters, but between Mushroom and Bird Falls' "Entrance" drop is the lower canyon. The run that Tim Johnson's called "Inner Sanctum" and Embick "The Labyrinth" was not a death-defying series of drops, but something Disneyland might offer if America didn't have a tort law-problem.

Thai Verzone led me down it a year ago at a midflow-level and we sniffed an instant packraft classic.

Now, what makes an instant packraft classic? For me, it's water that's best suited for a packraft -- of course, walking or biking is involved; it's small; maybe congested with rock walls or boulders; low flow; pool-drop and steep, but with no more than a couple (vertical) boat lengths in any single drop. It's something that gives a potent snort of pasty adrenaline -- no, not just a snort, but deep, repetitive inhalations -- with the option of running the good stuff again, immediately.

Not just the "if you flip on a drop, you can get out and run that drop again" option, but the get-out-and-walk-back and run the whole canyon, again and again and again. In fact this activity of "doing laps" needs some sort of verb-gerund.

The word "flipping" might work. It is what we do in packrafts when we fall out of our boats -- we flip. And if we flip, generally we want to give it another go and do it without a flip.

So, "We flipped the run" could mean to run something again in quick succession, like the entrepeneurs of the early 2000's "flipped" houses. To really stretch the analogy, "fix and flip" is to re-run in search of a clean run after a swim. Just plane old "flipping" is multiple clean runs.

I invite any of you reading this to come up with a word. Maybe kayakers have a word for it, but they probably don't carry their 40 pound loads repatedly to make a five or ten minute run. Maybe "yo-yoing"? Do backcountry skiers have a word for this sort of activity?

For the sake of the post, let's go with flipping and get back to why Bird's labyrinthian Inner Sanctum became an instant classic yesterday.

Flipping a run is approximately ten times easier with a packraft that weighs four pounds than with a hardshell that weighs forty. In addition, shallow, steep water runs may have a higher danger:difficulty ratio in a kayak than in a packraft. Upside down in a shallow creeks still sitting in a kayak might ruin not just your day but maybe your pretty/handsome face. It also looks like a kayak might be more boat than you need on a low water run, but I don't know. I have only watched kayaks and been in one in whitewater twice.

But for a packraft, technical little creeks with low flow make it easy to pause and pivot, drop your lines and slide your tongues. Plus an upturned boat more likely results in a bone-bruising swim than a bone-breaking one (knock on wood). Sure, swimmers still have to be wary of foot-entrapments, undercuts, wood snags, and sieves and all the rest of moving water's hazards -- and yesterday we cut a boat bottom, broke a paddle, and even got hung on some wood (downstream of the fun stuff in the salmon-slime butt-wiggle to the takeout), but a pinned packraft looks to be easier to deal with than a pinned hardshell, especially since it's harder to get pinned in a packraft in the first place.

Let me reiterate: all moving water is potentially dangerous! A packraft's forgiveness offers no substitute for safety training or experience reading water, but it does offer the whitewater enthusiast a craft suitable for places and activities where a hardshell might just be a pain on the back-side. Anyway, just my two cents for why I'm still packrafting every chance I get.

Yesterday, JT Lindholm and Tony Pirelli who have flipped Ship Creek and Echo Bend as often as anyone, came along, as well as some hot hardshellers: Tim Johnson and Paul Schauer in packrafts (with Tim in an NRS open boat -- watch for his Jolly Green Giant in the video) and Elizabeth Embick in a vintage helmet and a hardshell with her friend John. Luc Mehl and his winter Wilderness Classic Ski race partner John Pekar came, too, in their matching blue and orange Alpackas and Luc's new drysuit (he's trying to lower the cost per unit swim, apparently).

With all those boats there seemed to be more people than eddies at times. Thank goodness for "Bird Bath" below the "Bird-Brain" entrance drop, and the pool between Center Falls and the "Whirly Bird" slot where we could all collect.

It was a party and the packrafters "flipped the Bird" four times. I got a couple good flips and a couple fix and flips.

Tomorrow, I'm going back for just pure flipping. It's too good to pass up in the beautiful fall colors, snow dusting the peaks.