This is the North Fork of the Middle Fork of the Willamette River. We did what is considered by the locals to be a low water run, about 650 cfs (cubic feet per second) it is most often run at about 1,000 cfs. Pat was a little disappointed in the run, it didn't give him the euphoria feeling he remembered getting when he ran it last year at a higher level. I think it was a pretty good icebreaker for me though. I'm a little nervous about boating some more difficult water then I am used to; I also don't want to bash up the boat that I am borrowing. (I am in the purple canoe, backround of picture one.) To that end, I did portage two rapids Gun Shot and Bullseye. 
Gun Shot (picture at right) is a four or five foot waterfall that had a bit of a rocky entrance and we couldn't quite tell if there were rocks hidden at the bottom in the white frothy water. Turns out that there weren't any since both Michael and Pat ran it cleanly but by that time I had already carried my boat around. Bullseye was another waterfall-ish drop and originally Michael and Pat were going to run it down the center but after a little exploratory where Michael grounded out on the shallow rocks trying to get to the middle, it didn't look so good anymore. They found a diagonal slot on river right that dropped them moving at high speed toward the shore; both turned into the shore eddy just before bashing into the rock wall! At least that is how it looked to me sitting downstream. A couple of the named rapids that I did run are: Green Wall, and Typewriter. They weren't especially difficult and they were a lot of fun! The whole river was a lot of fun and beautiful. The water is a clear green color the multi-colored rocks on the bottom in some spots remind me of a bowl of M&M's. In other spots, it felt like I was on a water slide with large, long, smooth, bands of light blue-green rock stretching out downriver between darker reddish rougher rocks. It gave me an odd vertigo feeling and made it seem like I was moving super fast when really it was a pool section of the river.
Oh, as a warm up I rode a bicycle 5.5 miles uphill in my bathing suit and wetsuit after I drove the vehicle to where we were taking off the river to get back to where we were starting the river. Luckily it was still kinda of cool at 10:30am and the road was mostly in the shade of the trees.
A splendid day!
I am in these next two pictures. Click on them to enlarge and see me go through this small drop!
