Saturday, May 2, 2009

Vallecito Creek: 1 Mile of BROWN

Well I ran Vallecito the other day right after Pandora's box. Vallecito is truly the best mile of kayaking in CO that I have paddled, the quality of the rapids and the steepness of this creek make it one for the record books. Big thanks to Ben for showing us down. It was a good time. It starts out with entrance falls which is a tricky late boof. Directly after this is trash can which is like it sounds, a jumble of rocks with a couple holes afterwards. It then continues with some of the best rapids in CO. The hardest, in my opinion is "paddle,bitch" It is a tricky s-turn move with weird angle, diagonal holes at the bottom. The first day we lapped it twice at about 300cfs. This was a good chill level geting used to the lines and such. The next day we rallied early and hiked in to find it at a much higher flow. We ran entrance falls, and it was easy to see that it had come up. The boil was huge, and pushy. Jake and I looked at each other, it was clear that it was game-time. We had to be on our shit. I dropped into trash can, and was submerged through most of the rapid till the bottom where I boofed that last couple holes at the last minute. There were no eddies. We stopped only above paddle,bitch to gather ourselves for a tricky move. Everything went fine and we made it out alive, but it was clear we didnt want to go for another lap after a very intimadating run. The level was 450cfs. I love this creek and will be getting on it as much as possible. We werent able to shoot footage because we were too scared, and I left the camera on the first day so it died. But here is a little video of the creek from some of the durango crew killin it.



I just got a helmet camera and will be gettin in there with it soon. Happy brown running.

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