High Water Bruneau

mattvogt7

Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2012
Messages
108
There are some hard truths one has to accept as they get older. First - is it becomes increasingly clear that time is not on your side and you will not be able to see "everything." Another is that you will never be as skilled as your older brother navigating rivers. These things can be hard to swallow. So when life gives you lemons............

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Follow your better than you older brother down a river few ever get to see. That was my solution for this trip. Cherry picking an incredible canyon and solid whitewater with a solid group of people.

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The drainage photographed/written about in this post is one I'd like to plumb a bit more. It and its neighbor the Owyhee offer a lot of wilderness boating, much of it new to me.

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And while so different from the Colorado Plateau which seems to be where my soul seems stuck at the moment, it is not less grand, no less mysterious, no less maddening.

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Miles overall are pretty damned easy to make. Deep canyon riverside camping with ample room to stretch the legs make it a classic.

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We came at the apex of high water and as a result the edge of my comfort zone. Bank full and cranking a flip here could be rough. I'd love to come back with the packraft in the 300-500 CFS range.

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It's neat to be out with a group of people who're sharing with you one of their favorite places. All except my dad and I had been on this trip before and were neatly attuned to its intricacies.

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And yet, like those special places we all seem to cling to once is just not enough. Each return trip requiring further craning of the neck.

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Thankfully, with the river running high and miles churning by we had ample time to sit still and take it all in.

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But alas, we could not stay.

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This really makes me homesick. I grew up in the area and spent most of my youth in the Owyhees and Bruneau areas. Did you visit any of the hot springs in the area. If not it is worth seeing if any of them are close where your trip takes you. If I remember correctly there are a few in the area of the Bruneau and Jarbidge rivers. A couple either require accessing from the river side or rappelling down to them.

Sorry to get off topic. Great post with great pictures.
 
Matt,

These are some great photos. I got to looking at your Vimeo channel. What was the flow on that low water Yampa that you did? Also, I've enjoyed your instagram account this last winter, the dirty devil in rafts = awesome!
 
Gorgeous! Excellent photos and write-up. Videography was great too! Did you use some sort of stabilizer mount while on the river or did you stabilize it in post?
 
Thanks everyone!

@swmalone We didn't visit any hot-springs on this trip but i hear ya. I've run the lower Owyhee a few times (dying to get on the East Fork and South Forks!!!) and visited some of the hot-springs on that stretch, Amazing country for sure!

@Selway - we ran it around 750cfs. Got stuck a few times up top and glad to have the small boats for Warm Springs but we had the river to ourselves! The Dirty Devil raft trip was one of the neatest I've done, hoping to post something soon about that. Thanks for the follow.

@WasatchWill - thanks for the kind words. I did all the stabilizing in Adobe Premiere with the warp stabilizer filter. My camera just died on the Escalante River last week while packrafting it and I'm hoping to get a camera with some in body image stabilization for the next go around.
 
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