John Day, N. Fork

We came with intent to do this run on May 13th but were informed the Forest Road 52 out of Ukiah (the preferred route on the north side of the river) and Forest Road 10 (alternate route on the south side of the river also accessing Granite Creek access) were still snowed in. Tollgate Campground was a good place to meet and spend the night--just two groups of boaters in the campground on a Wednesday evening. We arranged a drive with the Dale Store to take us up to Oriental Campground and boated the segment from the campground and continued on down the run on the Dale to Monument run. In a future year we might try hiking up from the bottom with packrafts. The Forest Service said the river corridor itself was free of snow but the roads go up over elevation through areas of snow. The section from Oriental Campground down to Dale was mostly class II with no major wood hazards. A short basalt gorge, just over a mile downstream of Driftwood Campground, had some fun class III whitewater.