Caribou Creek

I ran the bottom part of this on June 7th, when the creek looked like it was at a healthy medium-high flow. The Matanuska at Glacier Park was 2.6' with most of that water coming from Caribou. (The Mat often peaks in July, but it's mostly glacial runoff from the South Fork. Caribou usually peaks in June.)

From the Glenn Highway bridge, I hiked up 2 miles on ATV trails to a spot where ropes led down a long steep bank to the river, and there was a dredging camp at the bottom. In less than half a mile (after maybe 5 short rapids) I came to a waterfall that was really difficult to get around. According to some locals, it was run routinely 20 years ago, but after a landslide people stopped running it because the landing zone was said to be too shallow. The landing zone did look a little weird, with a big hump and occasional spurts of water high into the air. I couldn't tell whether there were shallow rocks under there or not, but I was happy to pass on it. The advice I got was to scramble up a short scree field over a ridge, but I can't overstate how hard this was to do. I tied my throw bag to my kayak, put a rock in the bag, and tossed it over the crest so I could drag my boat up, but it took me probably 40 minutes to figure out how to get up there myself. It was easy to get 10 feet from the top, but that last little bit felt like any step forward would likely slide me back 4 steps. Finally I stripped off my dry suit and PFD and made a very determined effort, and did make it up to the low point.

The first mile or so of the run (aside from the portage) was really fun class 3-4. Lots of short rapids on sharp, constricted bends with single crux moves, some longer rapids after the waterfall with hole dodging, and a nice ledge boof. The last half of the run was class 1.