It's not suprising to hear about so many upper sections of rivers that have fast gradients and lots of boulders, with large drops per mile of river. I've seen so many of them, but only run a few.

Another large river that is very challenging in the upper section above the dams is the Clackamas River. I've run the wild section of the Rogue, upper N. Santiam during spring runoff, and other large rivers and they are cake compared to this stretch during spring runoff. They have a whitewater competition annually up there, with kyaks and self bailers and helmuts required. You can see some of the biggest rapids from the road up there - such as the Powerhouse and Carter's Bridge rapids. It also has some of the toughest sweepers in existance into rock walls during this high water; at least it used to back then. I haven't seen it up there since the '96 floods for changes.

One spring I was rowing a couple friends down this section in an older but very capable Hopi 12 ft. wide tube with welded aluminum frame. As we approached the top of the Powerhouse rapid, I had to do some fairly easy manuvering thru boulders above the main drop heavy narrow rapids with big rollers that head right for a big log jam. At the top came our scariest moment in whitewater - I did a hard one oar pivot right at the drop off, instead of a double oar pivot, and the right oar snapped in two at the oar lock. YIKES! "OH SH!T - WE'RE F**KED" I yelled. All I could do is keep the raft fairly straight with the left oar, but without being able to backrow it over to the left side of the big curl waves we were headed right at the big log jam. Honestly scared pale - all 3 of us. Just as we hit the jam, I pushed hard on the left oar so we hit the logs at a quartered angle and yelled to lean toward the logs. If you lean away from an obstruction the upriver side can suddenly catch water and sweep underneath almost instantly. This kills lots of people - even with lifejackets on. But we leaned the right way and were able to pull our raft along the jam as heavy water ran under the upriver side, and finally pivoted off into safe water. Wheeeee-ew! We never had a chance to grab the spare 2 part oar tied under the frame until we got down to the large pool below. ... Lesson: be sure your oars are in great shape to do such a hard pulling section of river. And for the toughest rapids it wouldn't be a bad idea to have easier access to the spare oar - maybe put together already.

RT