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.