Blue

Having paddled Cook Creek to the reservoir a few times, I was curious about Quentin Creek to Cook Creek, a 1.1 mile section which includes Food For Thought, a class five at normal flow. So, Sunday afternoon, 5/18, I paddled it at extremely low water. There is a substantial collection of wood just above Cook Creek and probably six to eight logs disbursed along the mile. But Food For Thought is clear and that entire section is just beautiful. It starts with a massive boulder river left, which is a big undercut at normal flow. That's followed immediately by a long slide, a somewhat less formidable Better Than, which terminates at an 8' ledge drop onto a boulder pile. I portaged that because at the low flow there wasn't enough pillow to run it.

I made a short video focusing on Food For Thought. I would like to go back with a bit more water.

https://youtu.be/kVypz8FPMls?si=0ooqowfAaRvArbiG

A beautiful spring afternoon on the Blue River with Clinton, Megi, and Tom. A flow of 260 cfs was about the lower limit of the range for this beautiful creek. We put in at Cook Creek and paddled down to the reservoir. We were on the water for about 1.5 hours. We encountered a couple pieces of wood to avoid but all were visible and easily avoided.

A lot of the problem wood was moved with our last big storm. Here are some recent photos of some of the bigger drops.

We had an excellent 1,000cfs on the Pat Welch gauge, and 5.21 feet reporting on the NOAA gauge all on snow melt. It felt similar to 1100 or 1200 during the winter rains. The gauge is downstream from tidbits so in the winter it is influenced more by low elevation rain than in the spring when all the water is coming from the top. At the same gauge reading at Tidbits, it can feel very different depending on the season. All wood was passable in the boat, though we did have one person swim and self rescue due to a pin on the teeter-totter log in pickup sticks. It was Bill Field's birthday and we had an excellent crew with good flows.

Ran this for the first time two weeks ago at about 470cfs and it was a lovely first-timer flow, with plenty of eddies but also clean lines through every drop. Pin cushion was the only one that caused trouble, probably because some folks didn't get out of the car to take a peek from the road. Easy road scout, worth looking.

Feb 2017: Food For Thought was clean and 5 of us ran it at 550 cfs. We had one person swim out of the bottom hole after dropping in backwards. All others came through without issue, the class V rating seems correct at that flow.

There was plenty of wood dodging below Food For Thought and before the Cook Creek put in, though we all thought it was worth it. We had one portage above that lower put in.

The run from Cook Creek down was splashy, fun and portage free.

The location of the upper put in. The overgrown spur road to hike in on is found about 1 mile past Quentin Creek on the right. Schwack down it a short way until it looks reasonable to drop to the stream.

Taken from the bridge over Blue River, at the top of resivour.