LiquidLore: Furry Creek

My first Furry Creek experience came one winter day last January or February after a big rain storm rolled through the city - after wimping out of running the Seymour at high water we decided to drive out the Sea to Sky and see what was up at Furry and Britannia. Furry was off the charts that day - but the seed was planted - it's a spectacular piece of river that needed to be ran once we could hit a good flow.

And that's the tough part - water levels are touchy - Steve and Ali had been looking at it for a few weeks every other day trying to find out when it would be good. Before last weekend it's consistently been too high.

After a high water bail out of Skookum and a decent scouting session up the Mamquam drainage we thought it might be another weekend with no boating - not cool since the weekend previous we also spent thrashing around in the woods out Lilooet Lake way without actually getting on a river. Then the idea of Furry came up.

After a quick pit stop to refuel on poutine (and good poutine at that) at the Mountain Woman in Britannia we rolled up to the links to find the creek at an ideal level. We got geared up and off we went. It's kind of strange going up there - nobody really knows what the golf people think of kayakers raiding the course to paddle the river - we got a few weird looks but the place was fairly empty - it was late in the day so everyone must have been on the back nine or well settled in at the bar.

Ben and Ali went first while the rest of us ran media or set safety at the terrible sieve in the immediate run out of the last drop. It went well, for the most part. Ali flipped in the problematic hole in the Crack Drop lead in and a few minutes later got beaten at the bottom of the last drop and lost his paddle - despite the moment of panic on our part he deftly hand-paddled into the take out eddy no sweat. Performance under pressure no doubt - it was impressive dealing.

After that it took me a few minutes to muster the courage to walk up and run the thing, especially after the excitement and the report it was way juicier than it looked. I honestly haven't been that nervous is a long time, perhaps compounded by the fact I had to run it alone except for the on-shore safety. While it was a really fun run through I'm not going to rush back to fire it up again...

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If you're up for a challenge and you can get a good flow this is certainly worth considering. The biggest issue is being out of control coming out of the last falls and going into the wood sieve. Initially I wasn't even going to post this to the LL guide book because of the sensitive access at the golf course and the seriousness of the whitewater. However, it's already in a guidebook (the River Gypsies guide) so I thought I'd add my 2 cents and I'd reinforce the idea that you should tread lightly here or access to this park n huck could go away.

And that's it - click here for some beta on the run. There's also a few photos of this cool place - this is one of my first attempts at trying to develop RAW files. I thought I'd try and get the Tantalus in the background but I just couldn't get the angle so these'll have to do....