Bridge Creek

Everyone who has paddled Bridge Creek has a story.

Maybe they couldn’t find the trail to the creek (is there one?). Maybe they got poison oak everywhere—even in their mouths. Maybe they launched off clean waterfalls to glory, only to get beatered in the in-between mank (who hasn’t?). Or maybe, scarily, they fell into the rapid they were portaging or had four simultaneous swimmers in a group of six.

The first descent of this wickedly steep creek was done in an RPM. One boater hand-paddled most of Bridge and all of Wooley (bring a breakdown!). There’s even been a successful R-2 descent. One crew blazed through both Bridge and Wooley in just four hours—no overnighter for them.

But for many, an unintentional overnighter is part of the Bridge Creek experience. A growing number of boaters have found themselves out past dark with no camping gear (definitely not me). There have been some truly epic nights at the Fowler Cabin, the wilderness refuge for wayward kayakers. Once, an entire group of ten boofed the final waterfall in total darkness, each listening for the thud of the boater ahead before launching blindly into the starlit pool below—then crashing at the cabin (also not me). That oversized crew huddled around the fire eating SPAM and SpaghettiOs scavenged from rusted cans left by hunters long gone—a fate so grim that two paddlers stashed their boats and hiked out in the dark to avoid it.

And if you ever find yourself at that last waterfall in the dark on your personal first descent, don’t let anyone tell you it’s a 10-foot autoboof. It’s not. It’s more than double that. You might want to throw in a boof stroke when it feels right. In the dark, the only thing auto is gravity—and yes, it still works just fine at night.

If you run Bridge Creek, you’ll have a story too. Please submit a trip report.

Much of the Bridge Creek watershed burned hot in the 2021 McCash Fire, and o

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