lake creek, the continuing saga

when last we left lake creek a huge fallen tree and several standing trees were blocking our route to get down to the log jam at pistol ;)

my what a difference a month can make!   no log jam at pistol, but more strainers and greatly different conditions at lake creek.

 this photo shows the exact area where we stood in calm water on april 28th and tied lines to our boats to row/line them into the shallow channel we used to avoid the strainer.  not such calm water now on june 1st!

this photo shows the approach into the two new strainers.   you can see the remains of the original strainer and the root ball, one of two, that now sits at the corner and blocking a center run around the corner.

 here you can see both root balls and some of the strainers blocking the center of the river.  this photo also gives a good idea of the routes on either side of these strainers.

here a kayaker from another group runs right of the three standing trees.  you can see the remains of strainer # 1 in the bottom left of the photo.

 here the kayaker moves river left to avoid the root balls and strainers that block river center.

 four of our group, in cats, take the most safe route.  we bail out of the main current even before we get to the three standing trees and take this shallow channel left around the remains of strainer #1.  this puts us well positioned, already left of the root balls and strainers in river center.   gotta love cats!  this would be a bit harder in a raft, but in cats it was a 3 minute bounce and drag.  3 minutes is a small price to pay for safety ;)

the last of the 4 cats works around the left of the root balls and strainers, preparing to park on the island below with the other 3.

a raft in our group runs the route we were all going to run, until the first of us in cats found it easy to make that shallow channel.  this route, left of the standing trees and then right of strainer #1 proved to be simple enough as well.

missing strainer #1 was an easy thing to do

making the pull left to set up for a left run around the root balls/strainers in river center was also easy enough at the 3.5 foot flow.  as water drops i am thinking that the red raft in this photo will need to move right, possibly drop into that hole along the right bank to slow down, and then drop into a reasonably deep channel along that right side that stays well away from the root balls/strainers.