Trip Report: Yuba (NF Goodyear's Bar) - 2/4/06 (+Video)

Run: NF Yuba "Goodyear's Bar"
Difficulty: IV+
Flow: 2000 cfs

(includes video)

Excellent end to an incredible weekend after running Pauley Creek the day before. We ran the Goodyear's Bar section down to the Fiddler's Creek takeout. Both the "California Whitewater" book by Cassady & Calhoun and cacreeks.com don't do this run justice. We put-in at the Goodyear's Bar bridge, easy, we encroached on some private land by crossing the bridge to go down to a beach but no one was around. There were a bunch of gravel bars and then Ramshorn was the first rapid of significance.

At this flow the right channel wasn't clearly evident and so we were confused for a while as we scouted, since it didn't seem to fit the description. We only noticed the third channel after running the rapid and then realized where we were. After scouting we picked the middle channel as the book suggests (which looks like the right of two channels right next to each other). There's video of that below. There were a bunch of other fun rapids not named or described in the book or online, so this run ended up being a lot more fun that you might think from the description.

Two pair had a no brainer line down river left, easily scouted, the consequences would suck if you ended up in the hole though. It's pretty nasty.

There were a couple of other really fun rapids, especially this one long huge wavetrain before Maytag down river left.

The video is over 8 minutes, but is worth watching if purely for the clean line at Maytag from Cory, very cool. In a playboat too! He made us all look like suckers.

Trip Report: Pauley Creek - 2/3/06 (+Video)

Run: Pauley Creek
Difficulty: IV+
Flow: 280 cfs (Estimated)

(includes video)

If you get the chance, run this creek!!!

This was my first time down Pauley Creek, and probably my second real "creeking" run. This was one of the coolest and most fun runs I've ever done - a total blast. It's amazing how much your first 15 foot waterfall will get the juices flowing.

Diane Gaydos took and edited a bunch of video from the entire run (thanks Diane!):



Here's me getting eaten but fighting my way out of the hole at "Slip and Slide":



But making it through with a nice boof over a drop further down the run:



We stayed at the Carriage Inn in Downieville, $80 for a room with two queen beds. Nice enough place, right across the street from the bar - not a good idea since we got hammered on tequila after the run then woke up hungover on Sunday to run the NF Yuba Goodyear's Bar run. Nice, very nice.

Downieville's a cute & funky little town which is kinda in the middle of nowhere. A good 4 hours or so drive from San Francisco with the last 90 miles on increasingly windy roads.

We had our fair share of carnage, most caught on video. Thankfully I wasn't in the middle of it, for a change. Nine of us went down, and nine of us came out! Only Brian ran Pauley Falls at the end of the run, a pretty bumpy ride down even at these flows. I didn't think it was worth the back pounding, but it was cool nonetheless.