Fully Loaded Honda Wagon

I met Oliver Deshler at Jed Wiengartens house in the Hawthorne district of Portland.  It took a bit of time and some of Willie Kerns straps to safely secure the boats for a 4 hour trip to Seattle for Ernies and Robe Canyon.  It was my first time on either of these runs!  Colby Mackley joined us in North bend.  We paddled Ernies first, it was pushy and stout.  We worked our way down the canyon scouting each horizon line because it had changed so much since Oliver or Colby had last paddled it.  Vertical vortex was a highlight for sure.  Big nasty dealt out some beatings, and I fired up Jacuzzi.  Jacuzzi is a twelve foot falls into a carved out cauldron with powerful boils that guard the exit.  Colby ran Jacuzzi back in the day while wearing a homemade life-Jacket and no drysuit… apparently he stuck the line on the falls but couldn’t paddle out of the “room of doom”  he became exhausted and eventually was vertically extricated by a rope wrapped around a tree.  The only problem was it took about 45 minutes and Colby dealt with Kidney Failure the next day…  The Moral of the story is to be prepared for possible rescue scenarios especially when time is a factor.  So we set up a few ropes on pulleys so in case I had problems exiting the carved out canyon I could clip into a rope and get towed up and out.  My intended plan was to melt this falls and hopefully go deep.  I went super deep and ended up popping up past the problem area twenty to thirty feet from the base of the falls.  My ears hurt from the pressure for a week and are just starting to get back to normal.  Colby Mackly snapped these pictures of me running Jacuzzi.

Tags: Ernies Canyon, Jacuzzi

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Featured Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.