California Mank: Upper Indian Creek in the Sun!

By Stephen Wright

After a fantastic Saturday release on the Feather, Jessica and I made a side-trip on the way home to check-out Indian Creek. After looking, I knew I had to go back. This creek can generally be separated into 2 parts, which are short enough to do both in a day. The lower section is most commonly run and is a beautiful class 3/4 run for around 4 miles through fun slidey, bouldery rapids. The put-in for that lower section is right below Indian Falls, which is a pretty clean 12-15′ falls. The creek above the falls is another story altogether: 1.54 miles of steep, manky, technical, fun class V that’s a handful for anyone! Dropping 343 feet at an average of 228 feet per mile with almost no pools or eddies large enough for more than a few paddlers, this run just keeps going! There aren’t any big drops to take up the gradient, so it’s really 228 FPM if CONSTANT 4-6 foot drops. Although it’s all runnable with no portages, most paddlers will probably want to walk the nastiest rapid just below the cement wall on the left (horrible sieve on the left 1/2 way down & the hole backed-up by the rock at the bottom gave me a scary and UGLY line). If you could actually memorize this run and bomb it, I bet that it could be done in less than 30 minutes. We had around 425 CFS, which felt good on the upper section, but looked a little on the low side for the lower section.

I loaded up at 7:15 with Reno high school teacher and master paddler Brian Karlin, and young Jason Craig for the 2 hour drive to the Indian. We made a quick stop in Quincy for some energy food at that cool cafe on the right. We stashed a bike at the take-out for the 5.5 mile run, then another stop to check-out the falls–SWEET!!!!!! The steep section is almost all roadside, so we slowly drove up and down the creek twice to look for hazards and other problems. We put-in around 11:00, and didn’t get to the bottom of the falls until 2:15. The 3 hours between was awesome: LOTS of great moves, boofs, and one of the most continuous sections of water I’ve ever run. It’s a little like Homestake in CO, but longer and junkier. Jason and Brian paddled beautifully all day. In fact, good lines were had by all with the exception of my attempt at the portage rapid. The weather couldn’t have been better: temps in the low 70’s and sunny all day. When we got out on the island above the falls to scout, it was with a sense of exhausted accomplishment. The falls were super fun freefall–perfect icing on the cake. I decided to just hitch back up to the van, and skip the lower section, as I was 1 tired mullet! I met a very nice Feather College student named Russ who gave me a ride back to the top after watching Jason huck the falls. They stayed to lap the falls while I went for the van.

Enjoy the photos, shot by all of us. Jason finally weighed himself at 110, which seems like a good, stable upper size for the Sidekick–it’s probably good to 125 or so but would float low at that size. I paddled my Hero, which did great yet again.

Live from Reno, NV,
Stephen Wright