Second walk off in a week

For the second time in less than a week I ended up walking off a whitewater run. The first was the Rubicon epic detailed in my last post. This time it was not epic. In fact it was quite mundane and rather easy.

After the trials of the Rubicon mission I had a weekend free for boating but no motivation to do anything strenuous. So I met up with a couple friends from Southern California at the N Yuba. The plan was to do Pauley and Lavezzola creeks and some section of the N Yuba itself. All class IV runs that I've done before and knew should be relaxing and fun.

The first day two of us did Lavezzola while the third member was still on the road. The flows were good and a little higher than the last time I did it. We took our time and had a nice little run. We had planned to do Pauley afterward - the runs are only 4 miles each - but we were feeling lazy and just went for a little hike instead. Our third arrived for burgers and beers in Downieville and we planned to hit the Sierra City run on the N Yuba the next day.

We slept in since we wanted to wait for the flows to drop in a little from the diurnal high overnight. We drove up the river and left vehicles at the bottom and middle of the run so we had takeout options. We put on and the action on the run begins immediately. While Sierra City is not as hard as the Rubicon it actually has the same gradient - there are really no pools at all for the first five miles. After the first big rapid of punching a couple holes I pulled into an eddy and noticed my shoulder was sore. I had hurt it a month ago but thought it was all healed up. We pressed on and the more I paddled the more it hurt. So when we saw the road dip down close to the river I just climbed out and called it a day. Instead of hiking up 2,000 vertical ft. I only had to go up 50 ft. Then an easy two mile jaunt back to my truck. Not a bad hike out at all.

But I think I need to take the point and rest myself up for a little bit. Just some teaching and easy paddling for a while. At least until my mini expedition on the coast in three weeks...

I had camera problems so no pics or vid. But here's an old vid of Lavezzola: