Icicle Creek Kayaking - Leavenworth Wa from Skipow Visuals on Vimeo.

This video is mostly Marco Colella and Rob McKibbin (I guess they’re OK boaters ), plus some others including Darren Albright, Dave Moroles, Adrian Wigston, and Dan Patrinellis setting safety.  It’s also a good reminder of how awesome the Leavenworth area is in general, especially in the spring and summer.  When it’s 72 degrees in Seattle and you’re feeling a little bitter because on a sunny day you still feel like you need to take along a sweater for when the breeze kicks up, in Leavenworth you step out of the car into 80 degree weather and a warm, dry wind – not to mention, it’s gorgeous out there.

Thanks to Matt Kurle for posting the video on his YouTube page, I think he took the video too.  I don’t know everyone in there but I definitely recognize Dave Moroles, Joe Howard, and I think Rob McKibbin.  One of the things I like about this is that you get to see seven people in a row do the same drop – it’s interesting to see the differences.

For the record, Dan is one of the few people on earth that you can take on a 7 hour dead-of-night car trip through the backwoods of Idaho without wanting to throw him from the vehicle by 5 a.m.  Or maybe that’s just me.   Anyway, we’re all really glad he’s OK.

This drop is rated a V on the Professor Paddle page, Charles says it’s actually less than that (depending on flow, of course) because the lead-in is not complicated and it’s not a super-technical drop.  What I know for sure is, really good Class V boaters like Marco and Darren make everything look easy, and given the right circumstances I could make this look like a Class VI.   But I’d still love to try it.

Thanks to Charles Graves for filming this!  (Due to having to skip the paddle after tweaking his back out getting stuck in a hole for 30 seconds on Tumwater that morning looking for my paddle that broke in half and resulted in my swim through Dam rapid – ouch! But that’s another blog post….)

Anyway, Sam’s in the lead, I’m in the blue and white boat that flips (huge surprise) followed by Rob in the red playboat and then Dave.  Notice how I completely don’t paddle going into that drop that flips me, and then you can hardly see it but after I roll up I do the next drop backwards.  Which surprisingly often works out pretty well – I’ve done it enough times that I’m telling Rob my goal is to eventually do all of Tumwater backwards.  And now maybe Icicle too.   Anyway, first time on Icicle and it was definitely a stretch for my skill level but it was a blast and I would love to do it again, as scary as it was.  (If you haven’t done it yet, it’s definitely a lesson in the ‘it’s bigger than it looks from the road’ department.)

P.S. I should mention that we put in at RV and I walked Limbo and took out at Ricochet.  Then Sam broke HIS paddle on Son of Ricochet.  It was just one of those days when things break, I guess!  Also, Icicle was 875 cfs on the Professor Paddle virtual Icicle gauge.