Yesterday and today's written and video blog entries: a chilled out day beside the Klamath river followed by an excellent day boating on the Cal Salmon.
After our two day paddle on the Klamath, we decided to have a bit more of a rest day. We grabbed fresh bagels from the shop at Somes Bar as well as a couple of lovely fresh oat scones with maple icing. We then fed Macy and found some maps of the rivers here.
They're a lot more into their water based recreation over here, the national Forest Service provide numerous access points for all the rivers, often with toilets, picnic tables and information boards. The information boards at the Salmon told us what levels were good to paddle the river at and else where (e.g. on the dam release sections of the Trinity) they say what the level will be on what date. All pretty good stuff, but they don't stop there: local shops display up to date flow data from the web and the State of California produce guidance booklets for popular rivers, with maps showing access and egress points as well as the location of major rapids along with the grade of the section. Their grading isn't always in line with what I'd say, but I'm not sure if that's me being used to the British grades, or them not accounting for level variances.
After a chilled out morning I had a little park n' huck on Ikes falls on the Klamath (for the uninitiated, 'park n' huck' refers to driving directly to a rapid and just running that, rather than driving to the top of the river and paddling downstream to a different point, as is normal). We also looked for the beautifully named (but unrunable) Ishi Pishi falls, but didn't really find a god vantage point.
We set up camp early and took to opportunity to use the solar shower we've brought. It's a bag you fill with water and leave in the sun – the sun heats it up and you then stand under the bag and open the tap and have a shower. Simple but effective and it enables us the luxury of being able to wash our hair.
On Thursday we ran a section of the classic Cal. Salmon – an excellent river I'm glad we caught, since the levels are dropping off quickly… To vary the media a bit, we've taken a video diary, let us know if you think this approach works, or if those of you checking in from work have problems watching it.
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We're off now to hop the border into Oregon and paddle some of the rivers there. We're going to stop off at the Smith on the way to see if that's running still.
P.S. We can add Bald Eagles and numerous vultures to the list of animals we've seen in the wild.