Island Creek

Ran Island today at 0.4. I would say this is a reasonable minimum, or perhaps unreasonable if you aren't keen on ELF boating. Most rapids are runnable without excessive rock bashing BUT there's a log in the first steep drop of Compound Fracture. The log is diagonal across the channel, extending downstream from the rock to the right of the channel, and crossing the hole at the bottom. Completely invisible from above--very glad that we scouted. The other bad places at low water were the entrance to the Cave (stupid bony), and the last stretch toward the confluence with Clear where the flow splits around an island and then goes past the pilons (brushy).

Learning from locals about this run, what I've heard so far: 0.4 is minimum, 2.0 is max (largely because other things are running when it gets this high), big water chops are required from 1.0 to 2.0. First time runs usually done at under 1 foot. Lots of slides makes for lots of holes.

1.3/1.4ish

~1.3ft

Here's how to read the Island Creek Gauge at the Put-In.

The level today was 0.85 on the first lap and not much lower on the second lap less than an hour later. This felt like a good medium-low level where the run felt like a creek but was scrapey in only a few places. A sizable rain event came through four days earlier that dropped 1.6' at the Crab Orchard rain gage and got Daddy's creek up to 4500 cfs. Today, there was 0.8' at Crab Orchard and an even 1' at the Wartburg rain gage. The rain stopped around noon and our first lap was around 5:30pm. As we neared the put-in, we picked up some boaters that were hitch-hiking back up to their car at teh put-in. They said that the level was just under a foot on when they put on so I assume it was on its way down when we started our first lap.

Here's a link to a really cool headcam video of the first three-quarters of this run.

Compound Fracture starts at 7:40 and ends at about 8:00. The paddler takes the left line at the main drop of Compound Fracture which is a very runnable line and in my opinion the easier line. However, you'll need around 0.8ft or more of water on the bridge gauge. http://www.vimeo.com/11470518

We are thinking it was between 3.5 and 4 feet. Very high...

I finally got to experience Island with some real water in it (1.35'), today 3/25/09. All of my previous runs had been low (0.4'-0.6'). Two people put-on about an hour before we did and reported 1.7'. They saw 1.8' before they set shuttle.

Now for the correlation with the Crab Orchard rain gauge. It has been a pretty good spring in ETN. There had been several good soakings that got many plateau runs running, some at high levels. But there had been two weeks with little to no rain before we put on Island today. Three quarters of an inch had fallen throughout the day yesterday, and then another 3/4 of an inch fell between 4 and 8 am this morning. The 1.8' reading was roughly 4 pm and the we put on at about 6 pm.

The Crab Orchard Rain gauge: http://tinyurl.com/knkot7

We had a good canoe trip down Island Creek during ALF 2009
Fun Slide Leading Into The Rock House Cave

I'm hoping to figure out a correlation between the Crab Orchard rain guage and the Island Creek visual gauge at the put in. I do think that Daddy's is a good indicator, but I'm guessing that Island could be peaking when the Daddy's gauge begins to shoot upward. Also, I think that this rain gauge could be useful when there's been rain on the plateau and you need to spring into action before the Daddy's gauge updates.

Slimerboy reported 0.3' (low but runnable) on Island on 3-20-08. There had been just over an inch of rain 12-18 hours earlier. It had been a relatively wet spring on the Plateau and many of the common runs had been running pretty frequently.

http://dwarfurl.com/88d72

I made a virtual gauge for this run.

It can be found here:

Island Creek at Nemo

Make sure you don't catch those pesky rocks in the center of this drop...

Splendid day on a great creek with a large group and minimal carnage.

Truely a gem, if you can catch it w/H20.

Neat little rapid that opens up into a large overhanging wall on rvr lft, surf wave is under the cave. Pretty cool!

Right down the gut.

Really rocky drop, after the initial abuse theres a nice recovery pool after another small ledge drop (See swimmer in background).

looking upstream

Ran this at 2 ft on the putin guage on 2/22/03. It is definatly a lot more pushy than at 1 ft. The holes are much bigger, and more sticky. There were no strainers that required portaging on our run. However, scouting Compound Fracture required several trips across flowing knee deep water. It is definatly a good level for the creek, but is pushy, and upgrades most of the rapids a step. Still nothing over IV+ in my opinion, but be sure to scout if you have only ran it 1-1.5 feet. There are several blind turns that lead to surprisingly strong holes, of which each member of our party spent at least a little time in. Who says the Blunt isn't a playboat, you should have seem my linked cartwheels!

The Emory was reading 7500 cfs, The Catoosa Bridge gauge was about 1.0 This drop is toward the bottom.

It was as crowded as Tallulah this day, with almost as many bad lines

look carefully and you can see a team jackson paddler eating sh#t below the slide

Compound Fracture