June 2008
As Brett piloted his Subaru north into Washington on a sunny June 30th morning, I dictated directions to Lauren (using our cell phones) to meet us at a gas station at the exit we'd need for the Superslides. While waiting for them to catch up with us at the gas station, Shane and I purchased a brand new Washington gazateer to help us with the details of the directions to the put-in on Goat Greek. Finding the put-in proved to be the least of our worries that afternoon.
We parked at river in a sunny clearcut under a brilliant sunny sky. Slushy puddles reflected the clouds, birds sang, and Goat creek rippled at the base of the hill through marshy little hummocks. Eager as puppies, we stumbled downhill with our creekboats, yelling "Supa-sliiiides!" as we went. Immediately we realized that cute little Goat Creek would require our full attention: brush and logs choked the creek in many places. Frederick emerged as the probe, blazing on ahead to scout, signaling and reporting back to the rest of us. As Goat creek picks up, the logs become increasingly bigger and the cliffs seem to rise out of the swamp instantaneously. To avoid the unrunnable ledges, we climbed up the snow covered banks onto the top of the gorge, sweating through our polypro. I wrangled my boat up the gritty bank ahead of the others, running ahead to scout for the put-in below the ledges. Where the springtime sun hit the ground, grasses were starting to show green below the dead chaff of winter, but in the deep canopy of hemlock and cedar along the banks, rotting icy snow was still drifted waist deep. As I postholed above the gorge, sweat trickled down my back and legs, even in the shade.
After finding the edge of the gorge and a likely route down, I raced back to the others. Jennifer and Shane had decided to go back to the car: with his casual shrug, Shane said he didn't feel comfortable continuing. Waving goodbye, Frederick, Lauren, Brett, and I set off dragging our boats through the snow-covered woods, winding our way down to the river.
What we presumed to still be Goat Creek had channelized and picked up volume when we launched back into it. After a few more corners, logs, and scouts, the sky filled with leaden clouds. Around us the air filled with heavy drops of rain, sheets of it obscuring everything around us. Logs lay across the entire river, eddies suddenly becoming few and far between as the river swelled up into the trees. In reality, we were on the Cispus by now, and the sudden cloudburst coupled with the snowmelt-saturated ground had conspired to cause a sudden change in the water level. Above the biggest slides and below the Unrunnables, the main obstacle became visibility and the lack of eddies to scout from. The first couple slides aren't very large, maybe ten feet, but they grow quickly.
Brett ran the first 15-20' slide first, indicating after his scout that he expected an eddy on the right; I followed. As the river dropped away into the fog, the banks vanished into it as well. Picking up speed down the dome, I stared to slide toward the center of the river, occasionally bashing rock; unable to see the right bank. My paddle blades scraped rock as I tried to get closer to where Brett ought to be eddied out. Through the fog, the river seemed to disappear over an enormous horizon line, perhaps only twenty feet high in reality, but running it blind made it seem to be sixty feet tall. "No, no, no..." my voice was lost in fog as I slid over the edge, unable to see any more than twenty feet in front of me, unable to change my direction in the swirling white. The mist and rain made the air so thick that I could have been upside down. Despite the tightness of fear in my chest, I made it down the drop without imploding suddenly. Seeing an eddy on the right, I slammed into the brush guarding it with as much force as I could muster. Branches and roots pushed back at me, and I dropped my paddle to grip them and climb through them to shore. I'd miscalculated and the water was so fast I could never get to the bank, all I could do was hang on and try to look behind me for a real eddy that would save me from the next blind slide.
How could I tell there was a slide? Oh, I couldn't see it, and the air was so dense with water I couldn't hear it, but a certain absence of river in front of me, a certain feeling in the sharp gradient. Maybe in the sudden shock of not knowing what I was dropping into, I lost my ability to process sound: but the blank wall of mist definitely meant "slide."
Whatever I hoped to accomplish in that shrub didn't happen: but I did flip over. With the paddle in only one hand, the water incredibly shallow and fast, and bushes and roots brushing the upturned bottom of my boat, I suddenly realized that swimming here would be the fastest way to break my legs. A series of rocks slammed into my shoulder, my hand and my helmet, and I desperately grabbed for my paddle shaft for the one attempt at rolling I was going to get before the chunky bedrock of the slide grated off the back of my head. My one attempt worked, and water streamed over my eyes as I was swept over the next slide, still alone, still not sure of the line, and praying like hell that there would be no more riverwide logs. I grated down, flying through the sheets of rain and fog in a terror, carving in toward the left side, which seemed to be the inside of a corner. The mist and rain lifted just enough to see a log fencing off an eddy on the left side. I swung into this miraculous slackwater, shaking and bleeding from a deeply scraped knuckle.
Lauren came bouncing down the slide next; I whistled her into my eddy and ran upstream to alert Brett and Frederick to our status (alive, still) and the line (down the center, don't flip, don't choke on the foggy air or your own fear).
All together again, we made the decision that we couldn't have far to go, perhaps just one more drop to the takeout. The river was definitely rising fast, and there weren't many eddies to scout from. The drops might be steep, but technically they require little more than staying upright and riding out the jarring and bouncing. If everyone could hold onto their poise for another half hour and keep hitting the skin-of-teeth microeddies, we were sure to be off the river. Frederick volunteered to continue to lead.
Frederick's back melted into the fog around a corner as he bashed into the next micro-eddy he could find. Minutes later he waded up to signal an eddy on the right, inside the corner. As I ferried out, fear made my paddlestrokes sure and strong; I gained on the murky current, ferrying as if making for a slalom gate positioned upstream. Missing an eddy might mean running a sixty foot slide blind: it might mean hitting a riverwide log like the ones we'd just portaged, bashed over and slid under.
Frederick had scouted as far as he could, which, he admitted, didn't tell us much. In general, the game plan was staying inside would lead us away from wood and keep us near any eddies we might be able to use. I snaked around the bend, surely only twenty feet behind Frederick, but as the river again dove over a slide, his back disappeared into mist. I concentrated on staying straight, but something loomed in the fog ahead of me. With a gasp, I desperately dug in a stroke that turned me sideways to a massive logjam. Dropping my paddle and wrapping one arm around the log as water rushed over my boat, I ripped off my sprayskirt and threw myself onto it. Freed of my weight, my boat bobbled alongside the log. I stared at it for an odd, disembodied second before grabbing the stern and throwing it onto the logs, luckily wedging it safely before I turned upstream to look for Brett and Lauren.
An orange boat was passing wrong-side up through the outside of the logjam, going with the half of the current that swept around a big cove on the right of the logjam. Passively floating, but evidently weighted by Brett underneath it, the current guided the boat safely under the logs splining out to the cliff from the dense center of the logjam. I could see my hands, suddenly holding a throw rope; my feet danced out onto a rotten log where I could reach him best if his boat became wedged. The boat kept moving, clearing three logs that levitated a foot or so above the water. Beyond the logjam, the slide continued its descent into fog, and so did the boat. As it moved away into the ghostly white, what appeared to be an arm surfaced next to the boat.
Helpless to do anything for Brett, I looked upriver again. Lauren, hot on Brett's tracks, was upright but only feet from slamming into the logjam, just a little further right of where I had hit it. My feet moved on their own, on a collision course with her trajectory. Lauren's face was a mask of determination and shock as she grimly wrapped her body around the log. "Lauren, hang on. I'm here!" I forced myself to speak as I leaned upside down to grab her lifejacket. Cursing every second that passed, I realized that I would never be able to pull her onto the log because I had to hang upside down to reach her. Water rushed over the deck of the sideways boat as the current forced it further under the log. Lauren hung on with both arms. "I'm here. Hold on." I sounded like a moron, poor little reassurances, but my hands had released Lauren and my body had shimmied to a position a little higher up the log, where large nub on another wedged tree provided a perfect anchor to wrap quickly with my throwbag. I spooled out enough rope to reach Lauren again, measuring the current and realizing that I couldn't pull her upstream of the log any longer because she had slipped even further underneath. She still held on, bearhugging from underneath the log, wedged but not stable. I handed her the bag and told her to hold the bag as she swam, paying off the rope and trying to get into the slower water behind the logjam. She was going to have to swim, and she was going to have to swim under the log that pinned her.
"One, two, three!" and my hands tore off her spray skirt and pushed her boat down into the water, under the log. She gripped the rope and closed her eyes as I shoved her down.
I swung desperately to watch as Lauren surfaced a few feet downstream of the log, rope over her shoulder in a perfect arc. She paid out just enough line to wind up in a micro-eddy bedhind a slanting log, which she shimmied up onto. Her boat surfaced just after she did, further toward the outside of the corner, bumping through logs and disappearing downriver into the fog. She climbed within my reach and I grabbed her to help her off the log.
I surveyed our situation, and the helplessness of it was overwhelming. Twenty minutes of greying light were left in the evening gloom. Visibility in the middle of this sixty-foot slide was about twenty feet. The water, formerly clear, had turned murky, filled suddenly with branches and sticks. Wind whipped the spray from the river into a thick fog blanket. The left side of the river was wooded, steeply sloping into cliffs, and at least forty feet away over roiling, murky water of questionable depth. Our logjam, about fifteen feet tall, rested on two enormous boulders and looked as if much higher water than this had created it. To the right, three or four enormous, battered and rotted logs splined out across the outside of the corner, just above the water's surface. The right side of the river was a fifty foot sheer cliff, at least twenty five feet away. Thirty feet of slide loomed above us, about the same amount below us (visible when the fog lifted and the rain stopped). I had my paddle and my boat parked on the jam, an extensive pin kit and a throw rope, half a bottle of water, a whistle and river knife. Lauren had neither paddle nor boat, and with them had disappeared food, water, and her first aid kit. Brett presumably had rolled up and gone downriver paddling (this is what I chose to believe), and Frederick had at least missed the logjam, but both had disappeared into whatever lay downstream. Neither one had any idea what had happened to us, unless they had conjured it up after seeing the logjam.
Lauren was a little palefaced, but calm about what had happened, self-possessed. One option might be to hop in my boat and try to get downriver to the guys. With the water rising rapidly, the light fading, my skills and energy tapped to their utmost, and their fate uncertain, this seemed unwise. No new victims, right? Crossing the river was out of the question: we were going to stay right where we were until something changed.
We moved my boat onto a huge solid log, one of the keystones of the logjam, and tucked the paddle inside it. The rocks anchoring the jam were wide and sloped into a little flat-walled taco, which we settled into. I sounded my whistle every few minutes, hoping one of the guys would be hiking upriver to find us. As the sky darkened, the fog and clouds cleared. The wind still whipped cold mist across our hiding spot, and the temperature was cold for a June night. Hiking around the Unrunnables had drenched our thin layers of polypro with sweat. As night settled in, I started to shiver. It was probably only seven o'clock: dawn was a long time away. Although it wasn't cold enough to make us severely hypothermic, the cold was draining and uncomfortably. We curled into a ball together into the notch in the rocks, arranging our sprayskirts and hunkering low to stay out of the wet spray and wind. We started to talk about modes of rescue: rapelling, helicopters, river crossings. Nothing seemed feasible at the moment. All night the river rose. We tucked our hands into our lifejackets, switched positions to warm cold backs and legs and shoulders, but nothing kept us truly warm and our limbs would shudder from the cold. We talked until our throats constricted from the effort, until our eyes closed and then jerked back open with cold or because a rock or log had begun to bound down the slide in the dark, echoing off the walls and startling us into sitting upright, staring all around to ascertain that something large wasn't going to hit the logjam. Eventually the river seemed to crest: the wood and rocks subsided a little. We dozed in the cold of early morning, dreaming of blankets, hot soup, and steaming baths.
Dawn cracked the sky, but the sun didn't penetrate the gorge and the temperature remained as it was. My skin and clothes were still soggy with sweat, and I was exhausted from being so cold, even though Lauren and I were wrapped around each other, rotating and changing positions as if we were studying the Kama Sutra of snuggling. As soon as the light woke me, I started to whistle again, loud blasts that were immediately answered by a flock of warblers. Their shrill tinny calls can easily be mistaken for a far-off river whistle. My delight turned into malice, wanting to spit and roast and eat whole one of these ridiculous birds, perhaps even a whole flock.
Finally a real whistle sounded. We jumped to our feet to see Frederick peering over the cliff at us. He tried to call to us, but we couldn't hear him over the roar of the river, the echo of the water on the cliffs. Pantomiming his question, my heart plummeted into my belly before I could really comprehend his meaning: "Where is the fourth boater?"
I looked at Lauren, who was staring at my leg, which jackhammered up and down on the rock. I gritted my teeth, lowered my heel to make it stop. I looked back up at Frederick's serious face, as he studied the cliff and the roaring slide around us, the logjam, my boat, my paddle. He gestured again: "Stay put." And then he left us alone with our situation.
All we could do was wait. This was Monday morning, but I wasn't at my desk like I should be. Shane and Jennifer would be worried about us. Brett hadn't showed up at home; his fiance would be terrified as well. My dog would be hungry.
The morning passed slowly by, us and our worries about Brett sitting on the rocks together, staring each other in the face and watching the sun slowly seep down the walls. The day was gorgeous, as the previous one had been, but we didn't have the capacity to enjoy it. We tried to catnap in the cold and wind, even when the sun hit us, we felt permanently chilled with a kind of cold that sun cannot penetrate.
I slitted my eyes down and watched the water until the banks started to move and the water started to hold still. Slowly it dawned on me that the dropping water had changed our situation. With careful footing, a river crossing might be possible to the far-away left bank, but a fall could mean a long punishing swim down the slide, possibly into whatever lay downstream. But on the right side of the river, the dropping water was starting to expose a shelf at water level: one wide enough to traverse carefully. The log I had anchored my rope to was eighteen inches in diameter at the butt, old and crumbly, slicker than snot, and it touched the cliff no more than head height off of the shelf. The traverse at the cliff base lead to an easy little scramble to the base of a steep sloping bank, studded with trees and shrubs. The receding water widened the shelf until I was convinced. We could even rope my boat over, if I crossed with my rope and Lauren clipped it in.
Tenatively at first, I started my shimmy across the rotten log, which was solid. I dropped lightly to the shelf, and was in the act of making a mess with my pin kit in case my boat didn't pendulum as expected, when Frederick appeared at the top of the embankment again. His incredulous look followed the line from shelf to log and over to Lauren, as she waited to shove my boat into the water.
"Brett's fine," was the first declaration out of his mouth. Something dislodged from deep inside my stomach: the ball of fear had been lying there cold and hard all day long. It vaporized. Frederick had brought Shane with him, and also, the sheriff, who was supposed to mark our location for a Search and Rescue helicopter. Earlier in the day this had been the only option, from Frederick's point of view as well as mine, but right now the shelf I had crossed was widening by the minute, drying as the water receded and the sun beat down on it.
As soon as Lauren's feet padded down onto the rock shelf, the only thing left to do was hike out. From this side of the river it was three rough miles to the cars, and Frederick had been over the trail so many times since dawn that he was absolutely exhausted and could no longer find the trail he'd been hiking all day.
Brett had actually swam after the logjam, not rolled. Jettisoning his boat and paddle, he bashed down another slide before managing to eddy out. He had been bumped and bruised badly, but not injured. He had not found Frederick the previous night, but had met up with him in the wee hours of the morning and learned that we were fine, but stranded. Frederick had never even seen the logjam, passing by it some feet to the left in the fog. After one more uncontrolled descent of a slide, he'd hit a log and gotten under it at the cost of his paddle. He managed to hand paddle into an eddy, before seeing two boats float by, unmanned. He too spent the night in the woods, about two hundred yards from the takeout, but unaware of this. After hiking to the takeout with Brett, Frederick had driven to get cell reception and summoned Search and Rescue, assessing that there was no way off the logjam save climbing a rope up the cliff, which would have been sketchy if not impossible. Shane and Jennifer had waited for us most of the night before driving to get cell reception and calling some friends who would already know we were missing.
The three mile hike after sixteen hours in the middle of the river was awful. I'd started out carrying my boat doggedly, but my endurance petered out and I handed it off to Shane, who carried it for me when I couldn't pick my feet up any more. The county sheriff walked to the cars with us, radioing Search and Rescue to let them know we were fine. Search and Rescue sounds grandiose, and I was humiliated that they'd been called, until the individuals I thought were neighbors or reporters met us about twenty feet from the edge of the forest. One of them looked like someone's nice fluffy grandmother, wearing a pink cotton pullover sweater and the other looked like a twelve year old boy in a three hundred pound body. These were the people who ultimately would have been responsible for our rescue, had we not figured it out ourselves?! They urged me to eat, and I urged then to screw off. Jennifer had made us macaroni and cheese and I slid into my jeans and sweatshirt gratefully. We gave the sheriff our names, hugged each other, slapped each other on the back, hugged each other again, then climbed into the cars to drive home.
Accidents on rivers seem to happen as a result of small decisions we make, in hindsight learning that each one was more unwise than the last, until something truly bad happens. I've been told over and over that we should have hiked off when it started to rain. Had known what we all know now, we certainly would have. For the record, the Cispus gauge thirty miles downriver read about 2700 when we put on the Superslides, which would have correlated to a comfortable 300 cfs or so. The next day it peaked at about 4000 cfs.
