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| Canyoneering | 14.00 Miles |
4,000 AEG |
| | Canyoneering | 14.00 Miles | 3 Days | | |
| 4,000 ft AEG | | | | |
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| | Intermediate Canyoneering - Difficult or dangerous; Tech Climb; rope reqd; descent anchor; exit technical; | | B - Up to light current; wading/swimming; possible wet/dry suit | | VI - Two or more days |
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| no partners | | What an amazing weekend! We camped up near the Tatahatso dropin on Thursday night. After a chilly night, we found the steep entry gully and made our way down to Tatahatso, passing packs at a few places along the way. Once in Tatahatso, we had a few hours of boulder hopping and boulder navigation before reaching the sweet redwall narrows. Luckily we all brought full wetsuits, because it was cold and there were a handful of swimmers in frigid water. I was pretty chilly in my 3/2 wetsuit. The canyon was gorgeous. I think my favorite part was near the end were there were several spring fed pools and some hoodoos. We made it to the beach about 4pm - perfect timing to try and dry some gear and prepare for our early morning packraft the next day. In camp we found out that one of the guys in the group, Ben had 4 holes in his Explorer pro. He had never used it so it was puzzling how it happend. He patched it and spent a neverous night worrying about his first packraft. I was nervous myself - There were multiple rapids on the 7 mile route and the consequences of a flip are high.
After a somewhat sleepless night we awoke and packed up, waiting to change into wet wetsuits at the last possible moment. It actually wasn't too bad. We successfully launched and headed towards our first mandatory portage - 1.5 miles downstream. On the way we navigated a set of riffles. I was surprised to find that I handled it without a problem. Recently I had changed my config on my packraft(Klymit litewater dingy). I used to need a backrest while floating, so I had my pack in back. This made the raft unstable so I switched to using a ropebag as a backrest. I recently got rid of a backrest altogether and I found it made a huge difference in stability. My last GC packraft - Lonetree to Phantom I thought I was going to come out of the raft. I found that having all gear up front made a huge difference. We had a few sets of riffles that were close to the clear creek riffles that I still have nightmares about and this time I handled them much better. Anwyway, we did the 7 miles in about 4.5 hours. The highlight was a rafting party giving us beer and being incredulous that we were out there in pool toys and thin wetsuits. We were told we had big brass pumpkins!  We finally hit President Harding, derigged, filled up water containers and started trudging up the Eminence break route. We didn't feel we had time to run Tatahoysa that day so we decided to drycamp at the drop in. My pack was unwieldly with wet gear, wetsuit, packraft, 4.5 liters of water and a 200ft rope. Finally made it to the drop in after two hours, and spent a lovely night with great views.
Sunday we got a dawn start to Tatahoysa. It was really gorgeous to hit the canyon so early. It felt really chill after Tatahatso. We hit the beach again and made our way back up to the drop in to pack up our stuff and hike out the rest of Eminence Break. I had actually done the route 3 years ago but this time felt sketchier.The extra weight made a difference during the climbs. The last time I did it we had only done Tatahoysa, so no wetsuit, packraft, paddles, etc. We finally made it to the top about 3:30pm, got changed, and started the long drive home. What a trip! |
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Route Editor
Route Scout
Now to get to the lower narrows required loads & loads of down climbing, rock hopping, and weaving thru boulders. 
Once at the narrows, we quickly suited up and began the challenging descent of this not often visited hidden gem. 
It was full of awkward short rappels into many cold pools with plenty of down climbing and rock hopping mixed in. The anchors are as interesting as usual in the GC yet solid from previous parties and careful rope management is required to prevent any coreshots or rope pull issues which we thankfully avoided. 
We setup camp on another sandy beach overlooking that rapid and set all our wet gear to dry before heading up the lower Eminence Break trail with our canyoneering gear to drop into lower Tatahoysa Canyon. Last fall we did this canyon, but we made a slight navigational error and dropped into the less exciting north fork. 
This time we of course dropped into the amAZingly sweet south fork and really enjoyed those missed handful of rappels up to 140ft before the confluence. Further down canyon, we again enjoyed those sweet few rappels up to 150ft in the lower canyon with the last one overlooking the river and our camp from a high perch. 
