Whitewater River

Whitewater River Trip Report New

Forum: BoaterTalk

Date: Apr 14 2004, 2:44 GMT

From: LVM

http://www.lvmvideo.com/quicktime/tommywhitewater.mov

It rained about 3 inches in the Joccasee gorges area early this morning and we switched our destination from the linville to the Toxaway.

Not a drop of water, far as I can figure the baseflow drains out real quick in the area due to the solid rock and steep gradients to the SC valley below. Also the lakes above the putin slow up the flow, no water egardless,

so we went to the upper whitewater and it was low. 6 inches on the gauge and dropping.

The only thing of note was Tommy Hilleke's run of the box canyon of the the whitewater. This mini gorge is unique to the East Coast, existing no where else I know of (maybe in New York St. or something).

Anyway, Corran is the only person we have heard of running it. There is always wood in it, as there was today, and it was kinda manky.

But if it was clean it would be cooler than hell to run down through.

Basic layout

Big slide entry, lands on rock..

8 footer lands in pothole, with what appears to be a large rootball and horizontal log.

then right into a log across the river only 3 feet up on one side and in the river on the other.

A couple of us portaged around and seal launched in above the bottom tw drops.

The seal launch first scoped out by Dave was a wee bit wobly, but we were committed to it. Chris Granthams was unluky to be last, and instead of risking falling into the crack/drop half in kayak, he chose to throw his boat into the pothole upstream, jump in and clamber in his cockpit.

The crack was about 4 feet wide and 15 feet tall. The final falls is a near vertical 25 footer.

Most chose the river left hand double boof. From the bottom it looked good...down the middle.

Daniel

LVM