Rock Creek (Bitterroots)

Rock Creek above Lake Como offers some of the highest quality challenging whitewater and on-water scenery in the Bitterroots. Big clean bedrock slides and rapids in a wide open scenic valley, with no wood (2018), and a couple must-make portages around waterfalls. This is a drop-pool or at least drop-eddy run, Scouting and portaging is fairly easy along the channel margins at lower flows except for the big falls portage.

Choose your own adventure to get to the put in from the Lake Como beach: paddle an hour across the reservoir, hitch a motorboat ride, or hike/bike with a packraft. Then hike a mile up Rock Creek and launch just upstream of the whitewater. Scout what you can while hiking.

Rock Creek contains some great Class IV slides, a big Class V slide sequence, a series of narrow bedrock rapids, another big slide, a portage of a big falls (portage in the tree filled cleft on river left), some more Class IV slides, a double drop that may or may not go, and then a technical rapid into the lake. In that order. Scout everything.

For flows, use Kootenai Creek as a very general guide. If Kootenai Creek is on the low side of good then Rock Creek will likely also be on the low side of good.