Another update from the road... Ed and myself joined up with John Kern, Polk Deters, and Joel to paddle an upper tributary in the beautiful North Yuba drainage. The day began with the group searching for an alternative to the 4-hour shuttle nightmare we had been warned about. We ran into snow and were forced to descend 1300ft into a trail-less canyon to the river. The run was long and started off really slow with splashy class 4 and several scary strainers. Slowly the river got harder and harder entering into narrow granite canyons. The only real info we had on the run was that once we reached a must run 20 ft falls with a nasty hole at the bottom we would be approx. 1 hr 45 min from the take-out. Realizing at 7:30 PM that we had finally made it to the 20 footer, the thought of spending a cold night in the canyon was quickly becoming a reality. After a quick scout we all dropped the narrow falls and paddled as quickly as possible through the remaining class 5 gorge. At one point Joel took two back to back rodeo rides and like the rest of the group was quickly being worn down. We had to make our way through sketchy lines with minimal safety in order to get through the hard stuff before we lost all light. At one point Ed got worked in a river wide ledge hole then once out we couldn’t even see his hand signals pointing us to the right line. Just as we were about to give up we made it to the take-out where a 2-mile hike to the car awaited. At around midnight the 5 of us swilled beers, ate pasta, and were thankful for not having to spend that night on the river.
The next day Ed and I jumped on our bikes to ride the trial that we had previously walked out on. While passing by a technical section of the trail, Ed flew 15 ft of the trail, rolling down a hill with his bike stopping on a rock pile. He walked away amazingly with a few scratches and bruises, a blown tire and camel back, and a bent seat.
That night we drove non-stop to Ashland Oregon when the soul rig ran out of gas. Our goal was to make what gas we had last until we reached the cheaper prices in Oregon. A mile and a half from the gas station the engine caught on fire after an attempted to spray WD40 into the intake manifold for a quick start. The mind works slow at 5am after an all night drive, but we managed to put out the fire with little damage to the engine. After a friendly visit from AAA we fueled up and continued on our way toward Portland. Somewhere near Salem, OR we were stopped once more by loud noises and a dropping oil pressure gauge. We managed to figure out the problem in a very crowded Costco parking lot full of fat people while a Jesus freak preached to us about joining the 777-heaven club.
The road is a very interesting place and the epic continues……
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