The funny part about this day is that the point was for me, Dave Moroles and Charles Graves to run Upper Icicle down to Ricochet or the Sieve with Rob and Sam, and then somehow we decided that after watching these guys run the Wall we would run the in-between sections of Tumwater first (skipping Chaos and POW), kind of as an afterthought.

Note to self:  Running anything in Tumwater at 4900 cfs is not in the ‘afterthought’ category, at least not for me.   It’s a good example of how sometimes things just escalate.

Anyway, not long after this video was taken Dave, Charles and I were putting in below the Dam.  Rob, Sam and Darren were a few minutes ahead of us, and Dave was looking a bit grim, understandably – he was in a playboat, and the highest I’ve done Tumwater is 1850 cfs.  Not surprisingly, about 7 seconds after getting on the water (and maybe 12 seconds after telling Dave in a chirpy little voice, ‘Everything’s going to be fine!’), I was upside down in Dam rapid taking what felt like mallet hits to my helmet.  I think I could have rolled up anyway because I’ve rolled up after some pretty massive hits before, but suddenly my paddle hit a rock and the next thing I know it was in two pieces in my hands.  It was a bit like, ‘Hmmm, never done this before’.

I didn’t try rolling up with half a paddle (although I realize now that’s a great thing to practice), so I got to swim pretty much all of Dam rapid – not recommended!  I was really fortunate to walk away with just some major leg bruises because the water is really fast and super shallow at the top – it turns out Darren had flipped there too and taken some major clonks before rolling up.

Anyway, once all the excitement was over (thanks to Dave for retrieving my boat, and Charles for making a solo run down part of Tumwater looking for my paddle that he didn’t know was broken) we ran Icicle from RV down to Ricochet (I walked Limbo, being pretty much topped out on adrenaline for the day) and Charles got this cool video of me, Sam, Dave and Rob running Roadside Attraction rapid.

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, this was 875 cfs on the Professor Paddle virtual Icicle gauge.

Many nice photos like this one on the River Gypsies Burn review post.

Leland posted a link on Professor Paddle to his nice review of the 2010 Pyranha Burn, here’s a link to his blog post with the entire Pyranha Burn review on the River Gypsies website.  There are a lot of good photos and he goes into quite a bit of depth about the various paces he put the boat through.

To my unschooled eye it’s hard to tell much difference between the old and the new version, but he and some commenters on the Professor Paddle thread definitely seem to be able notice them.  I think it’s pretty hard to go wrong with the Burn overall, Charles from AquaSports in Redmond says it’s the one boat that in 15 years he’s had only one person return because they didn’t like it, and everyone seems to rave about it as a creekboat.

After doing Tumwater the last two weekends I can definitely say I learned to fall in love with my previous-version Burn, even though I’m still portaging POW and man is it a pain to lug around!  Yesterday I was definitely weighing the disadvantages of possibly losing a tooth on that rapid versus the hassle of dragging the Burn up and over boulders on the river right portage – which is actually even easier than the perilous scramble down to the river if you do that portage on river left.  The tooth won out, but it was a close call….

Anyway, in the past I’ve gotten a little resentful taking the Burn out on the Skykomish to get used to it because I love to do that upper run in a playboat, but as soon as I got on the Tumwater run I loved it.  Mike Peele, who did Tumwater for the first time with me the previous weekend had the exact same reaction about his Burn – we kind of looked at each other at the same time and said, “I love this boat!”.  Although, a lot of people do that run in playboats (and Rob McKibbin of course makes bobbing blithefully down Class V+ Exit rapid look easy in his Dagger Kingpin).  But he’s around to keep the rest of us humble.

Full-screen mode might give a better view since it’s not zoomed in (long story involving a stolen laptop – aargh) but either way you get the drift.  Another great day on the river!

The actual best video would have been of me actually getting up onto Split Rock to take the video, which involved having to stand on the nose of Brett’s boat as he was paddling against the current and then throwing myself onto the side of the rock.  Oh well, you never have a camera rolling for the truly great shots.

Here’s Rob and Brett checking out the video with the super-nice waitress from the Gold Bar cafe (great desserts, by the way – huge pieces of pie.)