Paddling tips, tricks, news and gear reviews from an Unsponsored point of view
The category 4 Hurricane Joaquin brought some serious rain to the South East of United States. With flood warnings and most of the rivers rising incredibly fast, we decided to run Thompson Creek, one of the steepest stretches of whitewater in the East Coast with a staked loss of 800ft. in less than a mile, before the river meets Lake Jocassee.
Tucked away just outside the village of Dent this Class 4/5 gorge section runs fairly regularly with significant rain although there may be occasions when there can definitely be too much! It can become a very challenging undertaking at high flows with undercut walls and ‘boiling’ eddies. At perfect, mid-level, flows it is my Yorkshire favourite. A sensible decision can be made at the put-in: if it’s floatable and navigable it’s going to be good; however, if there’s a raging torrent, it will be full-on and the gorge will almost certainly be un-runnable. The river starts road-side around 5km outside Dent and the road follows the river for most of the run. In fact it’s only the last km that feels remote. A series of small slides and boulder rapids lead to a slightly bigger slide that right-angle’s to the left. This signifies the end of your warm up.

From here the river starts to get a little tighter and steeper with some quite significant pour-overs; nothing too pushy but a confident boof is definitely required.
There has been a serious amount of rain over the last few days here in the UK, with many rivers being listed as huge on one of the river level sites. Bastien’s edit shows us what the water levels have been like further up north from Unsponsored HQ.
On a wild snowy and windy winter day, we went paddling the Upper Spean river on 6 and plus pipes then a massive River Garry. I can’t thank enough my poggies. It was a good day. Continue reading
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