Well, regardless of what might have occurred in Chattanooga, it was apparent that Western North Carolina got a ton of rain over the weekend so five of us plus a shuttle bunny headed up to Fires Creek to finally get in a run on this little-known creek. Participants were Steve Smyth, Augie Westerfield, Brian Swafford, Tim Ward, Allen Pogue, and shuttle bunny Betsy Westerfield.
I have a little trouble putting into words the experience I had paddling Fires Creek. We put in at the first road-crossing that was available upstream of the Fires Creek Recreation Area. This gave us about three miles of continuous whitewater, and I do mean continuous. We set up an alternate shuttle so we could opt to paddle on down past the first takeout to add a few more miles of what we thought would be class II.
By the way, I now have a new definition of continuous. This first section is basically a 3 mile long class II-III rapid. I have never paddled anything quite this continuous and I have a little trouble imagining how I could ever possibly paddle anything this continuous again.
If you were to look at one small isolated section of Fires Creek, say 50 feet long, you would probably say "That's a class II," or maybe "That's a class II+." While true, the wary paddler must take everything in context. And on Fires Creek, the context is that the rapid was probably preceded by about 1 mile of continuous class II+ and is probably followed by another 2 miles of continuous II+, all of this punctuated by a few class III moves and wood, and if you're lucky, there might be five or six eddies big enough to hold, say, one and a half boats. You might not be lucky however, and you will be satisfied if you can merely turn upstream and paddle against the current without losing too much distance downstream before you hit that big pillow thing in between those 30 or 40 other pillow things and rooster tails all why trying to scout the next blind turn for wood.
Class II paddlers should not go to Fires Creek. You must be a class III paddler. And you can't just be the kind of class III paddler who has run Nantahala Falls a few times. You'd better be capable of paddling full-on class III without swimming or this creek will send you on a rocky quarter-mile swim through 45 degree water at about 6 or 7 knots. And you probably won't be able to find an eddy to swim to, you'll just have grab onto a Rhododendron branch and pull yourself up the bank. You can forget about your boat and paddle. Just drive down to the Hiwassee and try to pick them up when they go by.
As usual I was very nervous about doing a new run of unknown difficulty. I actually felt a little nauseous which happens when I'm stepping it up a bit, and as I am still new to creeking, I definitely felt I was in for an adventure.
Since a couple of us were really nervous, Steve decided it would be a good idea to hike upstream a hundred yards or so and give everybody a chance to run a couple of rapids and catch some eddies. If things didn't go well, it would be possible to take out and still get back to the car before dropping off into Nantahala National Forest.
The hiking trail up wasn't too bad, but the Rhododendron hell that lined the banks of the creek wasn't too much fun. We had to push around through the jungle and after a couple of false starts, we finally found a decent place to launch. Actually it wasn't a very good place to launch at all but with Tim helping to slow down our seal launches, we were able to get in without any flipping-over shenanigans. Everybody caught a couple of eddies, successfully ran the first III- without any real warm up and we waved goodbye to Betsy and headed downstream.
Steve was very concerned that we eddy hop our way down properly due to the continuousness of the run and the unknown problem of wood around blind corners. We didn't have to wait long. There is a blind corner less than 100 yards below the bridge. This was followed by more blind corners, more continuous whitewater, and not one eddy big enough to hold more than about three boats. It was incredibly fast paced, there was a lot of wood and there were a lot of spots to get pinned, but there was also a tremendous amount of high-quality whitewater. I began to get my reflexes in tune and was hitting all my lines. I was adapting to the speed of the run. Everyone proceeded in good order and I started to loosen up a bit.
Brian paddled up to me in an eddy somewhere and said, "Well, you wanted to start creeking! You got it. This is true creeking!" He was definitely right. This was my fourth creek of the wet season and it was definitely the most intense.
Just when I was starting to calm down a little bit, Steve warned us that we needed to get out and scout a drop that was coming up around the next corner for wood. From upstream I could see that most of the river bed was not viable to paddle and that the drop was probably about 6 feet through what looked to me like a rock jumble. Brian paddled up to me in an eddy just upstream and asked what was coming up. I held up four fingers and shouted over the roar of the creek, "A class IV." I turned out to be wrong about the rating (probably) but it's definitely a serious drop. Fortunately there was a large enough eddy just upstream of the drop and we all got out on river right to take a look.
I had to climb up the slope about 15 or 20 feet to get a good look and determined that there was no good portage available on the side we were on and getting to the other side would involve a hairy ferry right in front of the drop. I was a nervous wreck. At first I said I needed to portage it, then determined that portaging was possibly more dangerous than running it.
There was a very narrow entry slot that really needed to be hit correctly to get the only clean line through the top part of the rapid. It was a tight slot where current went through a slot in a ledge and drove directly into a boulder. If you were far enough right, you would ride a curler off the boulder into the center of the rapid. If you were too far left, you would drop to the left of the boulder into a series of very shallow pour-overs that might harbor potholes and also might have been too shallow at that level to pass without getting pinned. No matter what, going over there would probably be the elbow-bashing line, and I didn't bring any elbow pads. There weren't really any other options. There wasn't anything to the left of the slot and the alternate line on the right side was full of wood.
Steve and Augie offered to go first to show us the line. I saw Steve and Augie run it cleanly and it looked like they were able to negotiate their way down the rest of the rapid without too many issues and eddied out on the left. I started to think that I could do it and I began to get into my boat. Tim and Brian were waiting to see what happened to me.
I finally took a couple of good deep breaths to calm down a bit and peeled out high into the relatively swift current in order to line up properly. Steve had paddled aggressively into the drop but I decided to match speed with the current until I could get a good look at the slot. When I saw where I wanted to go, I took a couple of forward strokes to make sure I got over some shallow rocks and then used a couple of draw strokes to pull myself right where I wanted to be.
For a moment I thought I was going to hang up on the right edge of the slot, having cheated a little too far to the right, but I skidded by and dropped into the curler where I wanted to. I fell into the middle of the rapid with a little too much right lean and had to brace a little. Then I could see that the middle wasn't completely clean, there were a couple of holes to contend with . . . but nothing that couldn't be punched. All this was followed within a few feet by a long tongue backed by a hole. I took all of this in within about 1 second. I punched through the upper holes, got a little more swished around than I expected and hit the tongue slightly left and eddied out by Augie and Steve. I had done it and boy was I relieved!
Steve said it was a class III. I negotiated upwards a bit and called it a III+. In my mind, it was a little longer and more difficult than Nantahala Falls, which is an AW "benchmark" class III . . . and the consequences were definitely worse. However, it wasn't really a class IV, although at slightly higher levels there's no doubt in my mind that it gets considerably worse. There were plenty of pinning opportunities and any swim, especially a swim early in the rapid, would be almost guaranteed to be terrible, and there was no recovery pool below. You might just have to keep on swimming around that next blind turn.
Brian and Tim both ran the rapid well, although Tim got a little stern-squirted in his Centrifuge. That happened to him quite a bit all day. Hopefully some day Tim will be able to get a creek boat. There were so few eddies below that the group had to string out a bit when the last couple came down to make room. It's that kind of stream.
After this, I began to feel a lot better and relaxed quite a bit. Steve assured me that the worst was over and I really began to enjoy myself. Brian was riding an adrenaline high and got a grin plastered on his face that didn't come off for quite some time.
The continuous whitewater didn't stop. It just kept coming and coming. We had to avoid a couple of log jams, making sure to choose the correct channel when going around some islands. We had to eddy hop carefully in controlled descents in several places in order to scout for wood.
At one point we came upon a nearly river-wide hole that I had seen from high up on the mountainside when we were driving to the launch. It was a stopper but not a keeper. Everybody made it through but Tim in the playboat got turned completely sideways when he dropped in and sat there for a minute on the backwash. I thought we might get to see a little freestyle rodeo action but he got lined up straight again and slowly flushed downstream.
We rode curlers, skidded over shallow ledges, dodged boulders and trees, and did quite a bit of laughing. Brian decided that Steve had made up for taking us to the Upper Tallulah a couple of weeks before, where we had ended up paddling three miles of class I at the end of the run. We were having one of the best runs of our lives and we knew it. The creek never disappointed, continuing to run between steep forested slopes, and Rhododendron-lined banks. At the beginning I feared that we wouldn't get to the takeout but by this time I began to fear that we 'would' reach the takeout. I didn't want it to end.
When we finally started to get close to the first takeout, we saw Betsy on river right. She had hiked upstream on a paved trail to warn us that there were two slightly offset strainers ahead that were passable but a little sketchy. We got out to take a look. Steve, Augie, and Brian decided that it was good to go and didn't want to carry their boats but Tim and I decided to walk it. We weren't missing any good rapids so I decided there was no point in taking a chance. Steve, Augie, and Brian all made it through the strainer slalom with some aggressive paddling.
After this we paddled around the corner and avoided a big hole right in front of the first takeout that turned out to be a play spot and eddied out to regroup. We could stop there and take out, just stretch and eat lunch, or we could keep going, since we had set another vehicle at an alternate takeout a couple of miles down the Hiwassee from the confluence with Fires Creek.
It was getting late, the sky had clouded up, and it was cooling off so I voted that we just continue so that we could run the entire thing before dark. Everybody else also wanted to keep going so we told Betsy to meet us at the Big River takeout. We paddled downstream and the creek quickly began to calm.
We had to get out to walk around a tree that was all the way across the creek. It was an easy and quick portage. Then we passed out of Forest Service property and the houses began.
This banks along this stretch of the stream are clearly under development and there were "for sale" signs facing the creek all along there in wooded lots. The lower stretches of the creek are going to suffer the same fate as so many other streams in Southern Appalachia. It's the "Cartecay-ization" of our wilderness runs.
At one point we had to paddle over a submerged concrete driving bridge which forms a ledge that is disturbingly similar to lowhead dam. It didn't appear to be possible for water to go under it but it has a pour-over feature and there could also be an upstream recirculation. Need to be careful there at higher water.
There was a really fun four foot slide and several other class II rapids by these houses. This was a sign of things to come. The further we paddled, the more we came to appreciate the creek. Although it had lost it's character of being a mountain creek, it had taken on the character of being a high-quality class II playboating run, similar in places to the Cartecay, in other places more like the Nantahala. We got in a bit of surfing and we entered a stretch where the channel narrowed between overhanging Rhododendron hells on both sides. This continued for quite some distance. Steve was very surprised at the length as he had thought it was much shorter.
Even though the creek was a bit calmer in this stretch, we still had to look out for wood, and at one point Augie and Brian stacked up on a log that went nearly all the way across. Fortunately the water was neither deep nor extremely fast moving in that area and they were able to extricate themselves. More paddling continued and spirits were very high. I knew it was one of the best trips I have ever been on. It was a spectacular run!
Finally we reached the confluence with the Hiwassee River. We thought the takeout would be right around the corner and we would be glad to see it as it was getting truly cold and we were hungry and thirsty. We paddled and paddled and paddled and ran some class I+ shoals here and there. And then we paddled and paddled more and I verified with Steve that the takeout had to be downstream, right? Finally, when it was beginning to get dark, we rounded a corner and saw the takeout ahead. Whew!
As we changed clothes in the frigid wind of the early evening, we all agreed we would be back (but maybe use the first takeout). The trip and creek get my highest four star rating!
