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Thursday, January 6, 2011

Class IV Classics: Upper Gordon

We're back after a long holiday break to spread the whitewater love! After a tough deliberation we sent the LL staff home for a month to enjoy the festive season and recuperate from a hard year of bloggin' and paddling all kinds of sweet whitewater. Yeah right.... in reality, winter makes for slow kayak blog writing and although we are sitting on a fair number of new runs to scribble about, they usually just get posted up without a .blogspot companion lately.

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The latest update is from a great class IV section of the Gordon River on Vancouver Island. Good pool-drop whitewater with a long window of runnability make it a great resource. Lots of different people will enjoy this one - at lower levels it's good for intermediates, or it is a sweet warm up for the Middle Gordon. If you need to run gnar go at high water - it's probably a handfull.

Unfortunately the weather on the Island is often wet and grey, making for gloomy photos - check em out.


Tranquil put in on the Upper.


Maybe you can use this as a gauge rock. The metal thing is a paddler memorial.


One of the first notable rapids - good river running.




Triple Drop. This photo clearly shows the limitations of shooting with a D40 in very low light - the high ISO performance (1600 here) is not great. Most of these photos are shot with a Sigma 10-20 which is decently sharp when shot wide open, as all except one of these photos were.


Triple drop a few days later. The rain on the first day brought the river way up - this is on the downward trend. Notice the water color difference?


The Terminator. The last optional rapid. It's not big but the hole at the bottome looks terrible. Joe Box skirts the beast.

1 comment:

Doreen Murgatroyd said...

He makes class IV look easy!