San Juan

We put in behind the malt shop and floated to the take out in 4:45 with a fair amount of paddling. The canyon was beautiful and had a lot of non-stop class II action. The description from 2004 was nice to read beforehand, but honestly struggled to match it up with the river. I could not tell where that bridge rapid was and it totally neglected to mention a 3-4ft high vertical waterfall drop at 37.163451, -107.038981. Scouting is very recommended here and it is portage-able river left at low flows. Unsure about higher flows. It looks very intimidating, but is a straight line across the river so lining up the drop is easier than the dozens of U-shaped dams/man-made drops above and below. Staying perpendicular to the holes below these was a challenge with the curvature of the drops. We did have one paddler flipped in a hole below one of these dams and the hole kept his boat for ten minutes before we portaged back upstream and rammed it out with another boat.

We were in packrafts and I would say 500 is a good bottom flow for this stretch. We were having to scoot across some shoals and riffles, but if you knew the river, you might be able to avoid them.

One other aspect of the 2004 report that was lacking was mentions of all the islands that the river splits around. There's probably about a dozen and the way around is not always clear. Some channels look promising at the head of the island, but looking back up from the bottom, they're either very shallow or have some wood.

Overall, really fun float and good step up for Class II boaters looking for some class III. It's not a casual float and sure higher water is trickier, but we enjoyed it at these flows. Looks like levels have dropped into the 300's only days later though so might be over till next year.

Takeout for a 14.5 mile float- 37.12610770472159, -107.05186362767749