Expeditioners:
Brian Swafford
Chris Selby
Stacy Stone
Augie Westerfield
Besty Westerfield
Kenny Warwick
Hal Tutor
Mike Pratt

Level ~350 cfs

After a vote of 5 to 4, we launched at the Jett Bridge access point to allow for a 2.5 mile class II+ warm-up on Clear Creek. This meant that the length of the run was stretched to 10 miles, quite a long paddle for a winter day. We would have to keep up a lively pace.

The section between Jett and the normal put-in at Lilly bridge is a lively class II run with a couple of II+ rapids, The Grunch, and Lilly rapid. We really moved along quite well with the swift current of the creek in this section. We were at Lilly in about 45 minutes, which is fairly amazing as it implies we were averaging over 3 miles per hour.

At Lilly we caught an eddy and discussed the need to scout the first major rapid, Jack's Rock Falls. This was an obvious big horizon line and we could see another group getting out to scout on river right. We all carefully descended to a good spot and took a look at it. It's a sliding drop with a nice tongue that ends in an auto-boof flake in the middle with a terrible looking hole on river left right next to a boulder. The right side drops onto a shelf and some other rock. The key to running the rapid is to identify the correct approach path over a hump of water in the approach, because you cannot see the bottom of the rapid from the entrance. If you hit it correctly you will auto-boof over the hole and everything ends well. If you go too far right there is some rock slamming and if you go too far left you will get trashed in the hole.

Below this we ran a very tight right slot followed by a left 90 degree turn at Camel Rock with no problems. Then we approached the big named rapid of the run: Wooten's Folly. Wooten's is a somewhat more complicated rapid at the level we experienced. The best line was to run the first ledge on the right, punching a small wave-hole, then dodge to the left of an exposed slab in the middle of the rapid before executing an S-turn back to the right, dropping into a somewhat nasty-looking curler hole of a 3 or 4 foot drop that pretty much shoves you into an eddy in the middle of the creek. This is followed by a nearly river wide hole below that I punched on river left.

Here is a short video showing Jack's Rock and Wooten's Folly.


Clear Creek, Tennessee from Allen Pogue on Vimeo.

Unfortunately the video does not show the entire sequence of running Wooten's all the way from the top, as the paddlers in the video elected to eddy out on river right, before I could get positioned. I had a pretty good run through there, all the way from the top to below the second ledge without eddying out. Making the S-turn around the rock in the middle of the rapid was a little harder than it looked from the scouting rocks.

After this there was some nice class II and II+ before we reached the bigger water of the Obed River. We had difficulty identifying all of the rapids, although at one point we punched through a weak point in a large hole that Augie identified as Canoe Hole. There were frequent class II and II+ drops with possible a couple of easy IIIs thrown in for good measure. There were also some long flat pools that required fighting against a bit of a head wind. Finally we reached the confluence with the Emory and I knew for sure that we would make it to the takeout before dark, a good thing under any circumstances and especially on the first day of February.


There is some very nice scenery throughout the run.


The entire thing is cliffed out along the rim and we saw rock climbers a couple of times as well as these cool looking undercuts.

Mexican food followed in Harriman and a return home to catch the end of a very close Super Bowl. Nice.