East Fork Owyhee River – Into the Belly of the Beast

Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4!

Day 3 : The Suspense Is Killing me

Sunrise on the third day of this East Fork Owyhee River adventure brought bluebird skies and one of the first really warm days of 2021. Despite that beautiful start to the day, I knew we were going to tackle Owyhee Falls today. Comforting to me were the YouTube videos of families and middle aged couples managing the portage at Owyhee Falls in Lambert Gorge, but there was still a bit of a knot in my stomach.

We had opted to try for Owyhee Falls this day, then hopefully camp downstream from them. This would put the biggest portage today, and another serious portage on the next day. This seemed a reasonable plan. Ken had made sure we kept an extra day in our hip pocket just in case we couldn’t manage this schedule. In hindsight, that was a helluva good plan. I sent my twice-daily Inreach “I’m ok” signal and off we went.

Push-Pull, Give and Take on the East Fork

Man, I’m here to tell you that Ken, Tammy, and I spent more than our fair share of time pushing the boats off of rocks. We’d line up these damned rapids just perfectly, then what’dya know, we’d slam into a hidden rock and the whole plan for the rapids just went to shit. Repeatedly. In fact, it was the rare rapids that we ran clean. So, we’d try spinning, pushing, pulling, and scraping with our paddles. When that didn’t work, I got out and pushed, just as man has been doing for several thousand years….

When things got really shallow, Tammy and I both got out and pushed. This got old awfully fast, so every riffle/rapid had my undivided attention. Tammy and I took turns and practiced calling the perfect line. We never really had any worry about tipping over but we sure as heck were excited every time we got through a rapid without hanging up on a rock!!

Lambert Gorge – Crazy Cliffs          

As we slid past Rickard Crossing (Part 2), the gorge began to tighten its grip on us. Lambert Gorge is among the most incredible places on earth, where the sheer canyon walls end directly in the river for miles.  Somewhere after we entered Lambert Gorge, we ran Boulder Jam, a Class III rapid, but we were pretty much unaware of it. I suspect at low water it is more of a Class II+, but any moving water that avoided us getting out and pushing or pulling was most welcome!

Tammy came on this trip largely because of Lambert Gorge. I have to say, it really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Luckily the wind was moderate and we were able to keep pace through most of the gorge. Somewhere along the line that day, Ken found a large bull elk shed, but we opted to leave the stinky pointy thing behind. Didn’t seem like worth the 15 or 20 pounds of hassle. Gradually, we neared Owyhee Falls…

Coming to Owyhee Falls in Lambert Gorge

I believe we hit Owyhee Falls about 1:00 in the afternoon. It really is hard to miss Owyhee Falls, and God knows we had this sucker GPSed in about as tightly as we could. The noise from the falls is obvious and even a little bit ominous. We were able to drift up to within about 20 yards of the falls and easily beach into the rocks on the right without any drama or concern. We pulled the boats safely up out of the water and unloaded the first batch of gear. Ken and I took separate paths, river right, through the house boulders along the falls.

I was honestly shocked at the distance we had to go in these boulders. I’m not sure if it was 100 yards or 200 yards, but it took us 20 minutes just to get a couple of packs to the possible put-in. Ken and I compared notes and we came up with what we hoped was the best path, slightly closer to the cliff face than the river. By then, Tammy had started to bring bits of gear out into the rocks.

One Foot at a Time

We brought the first unloaded boat into the boulder patch. We debated taking the air out and rolling each up. At about 80 pounds, this would make for a compact but really difficult to manage little package. Rolled up, these boats are about two thirds the size of a small 4-wheeler. So we decided to try moving them inflated. We developed a system that worked pretty damned good. The person at the front would estimate how far he could safely go and say “two feet!”. If the back guy said, “no, one foot” or “ok” then that’s what we did…on three. “One, two, three, three feet!”.

I don’t honestly know how long it took us to get the first boat to the “put-in” but I’d guess it may have been an hour. What scared me the most was moving in boulders that ranged from four feet to twenty feet in diameter. I was keenly aware we were in a very sketchy location with no real way out but down the river. A broken ankle, collar bone, or arm (or God forbid, something worse) could spell real trouble for us and it wasn’t hard to imagine it.

Sketchy Times in the Boulder Pile

We repeated this ritual for both boats and all our gear. I made one really bad leap to a rock and my feet found slender dogwood branches laying across the rock. I slammed into the rock chest-first, catching myself with my now very bruised hands but no broke bones. Ken had a tumble and so did Tammy but we all managed to get through this ordeal with nothing more than some really painful bruises.

In hindsight, this may have been the most dangerous part of our trip. The long boats kind of provided something to hang onto, sort of ballast. This turned out to be the right call leaving them inflated and we arrived at the bottom covered in sweat and exhausted, but safely there. When we lowered the boats into the water below the falls, we soon found out we had a lot of hip-deep wading to do to safely navigate the boulder piles at the tail of the falls.

No Problemo – Owyhee Falls Portage Redux

This was a really sketchy time. The Class V falls were really more like Class VI at low flow. There was simply no way to run this rapid in any craft. Maybe you could have carved a stick boat and it would have come out the other side, but I doubt it. I know people have run these falls, but no damned way anyone was running them on this day. When we tallied our time to paddles back in the water and moving, we were sitting right at 6:00 PM.

This was really hard. I’ve heard of people packing their gear for a mile or so on river left. That had the advantage of being mostly done upright, but wow, what a long way to go. No matter how you slice this, the portage at Owyhee Falls is easily the most difficult part of this trip. Give it some respect and give it enough time. There is no shortcut to getting through it.

We Surrender

Camp for night 3 on the river could not have come soon enough. Luckily, a little over one mile below Owyhee Falls is a beautiful camp on river right. This was such a nice sand bar camp and I’m not going to lie…I felt like we had the biggest part of the trip behind us and we could relax just a little. I can’t remember for sure, but I’m pretty confident we still had some below room-temperature beers left and they sure did taste good…I think. Knowing we “only” had a seven mile morning the next day, I was feeling confident.

At camp that night we had relief and higher spirits. We stayed up a little later and enjoyed some whisky and conversation. Sometime in the middle of all of that, Ken apparently noticed an intermittent light across the bank in the dark. He didn’t say anything, but as Tammy and I were crawling into our tent a little later, I saw that light. I figured maybe it was a firefly and mentioned it to Tammy. She didn’t believe until it flashed again, then she was a little freaked out. I’m not sure what it was but it was almost like an LED light that just randomly blinked from time to time. Why do I put this in the article? I have no idea, it was just a curiosity and we never solved it.

Day 4 : Home Stretch in Lower Lambert Gorge

We awoke on Day 4 feeling really good and even I had a little breakfast. By now, we were getting pretty efficient at repacking gear and we got to our boats in good time ready to take on a brand new, and final day. Luckily, the water picks up just enough here (don’t ask me why) that we were able to wade and push-pull a lot less. Join us here for Part 4 of this adventure!