C-water….
Posted by Chris on October 27, 2007 at 11:59 pm | In Rivers |There is a small group of us here in Bellingham that are absolutely obsessed with Clearwater creek. If it’s raining and the Middle Fork Nooksack guage is going up, I can guarantee you there will be a flurry of phone calls, text messages, or e-mails, with talk about ditching work for evening laps or, like earlier this week, possible dawn-patrol.
Randal Reinders early on during the 1st lap.
Some reasons we are so obsessed: Almost 300fpm for 2 miles, bedrock ledges and boulder gardens, 35 rapids, 22 good boofs (yes, you are reading that right), 17 minute laps, no portages, and some of best pac-nw beers only 15 minutes away at the North Fork brewery.
Ryan Bradley finesses his way into the Slippery Slit
Clearwater creek runs a lot, but, because of how flashy it is you rarely get more than a 6 hour window of time to get in as many laps as possible, and consider yourself lucky if the flows happen during daylight hours. During the spring melt however, you can sometimes get a full day of pure boating bliss.
Randal Reinders on boof #17. Rapid: Bark-no-bite.
This is one of those runs where it really pays off to have someone guide you down. I have seen groups of people take 3 or more hours to get down this run on their own, so get ahold of a local and buy them some beer for showing you around.
The boys at the take-out of lap one.
Look for rain event flows of 1100-1600 cfs and spring runoff flows of around 900-1400 cfs. If you come up and things are too low, drive up the road a bit further and put on the Upper and Lower Middle Fork runs. If flows are too high, you can head to the NF Nooksack for laps on the Horseshoe Bend section.