St. Joe, N. Fork

We ran the North Fork and had a great time. My brother and I were in packrafts and our friend was in a kayak. We dropped a car off at the dumpsters and rolled up the Moon Pass road, scouting the river at any point we could throughout the drive. We could see wood here and there but nothing that completely blocked the channel. The flow on the Calder gauge was about 3100cfs and we would guess the north fork had a good 500-700 in it. We did not end up driving all the way to Loop Creek for the put in, we thought we had driven far enough up and decided to put in across from the Big Dick Creek confluence, to access we took the forest road right before the first tall bridge on the Moon Pass. The put in we used is on river right and the Moon Pass road goes over a second tall bridge on the other side. Upon looking at the map after returning home we found this was only a couple miles downstream of Loop Creek.

There is a small rock wall on the opposite side of the put in, it is quite undercut and when we ferried over to it we could see the light shining under it use caution here. From the put in we enjoyed a few easy class II sequences which mostly consisted of little gravel bar rapids with the occasional wood hazard to avoid and shallow channel to bump down. Not too far into the run there was a quarter mile or so of class III action that was pretty continuous and technical. The river here takes on the same characteristics of the rest of the river but gets a bit steeper, narrower, and the boulders get a little bit bigger making bigger waves and holes. There was no wood when we ran it but this is somewhere that it could sneak up on you really fast. A little further down after passing through some more II-III rapids you'll pass under the Moon Pass bridge and then the forest road bridge. From here down the river chills out a bit and feels more like the beginning of the float. It's a nice meander down to the takeout, with the occasional ATV passing by. We took out at the dump and camped upriver near the put in. Whole float took around 2.5 hours.