Adventures on the South Fork Tuolumne River

By Darin McQuoid

Photos

Once we got done with a fantastic run down the Waterfalls of Dinkey, Ben Stookesberry and I headed north in search of more adventures. We arrived in Groveland and met up with fellow JK paddler Chris Korbulic who was carpooling with our friend Evan Garcia. With flows still too high for our multi-day projects, we looked for an obscure and challenging run to fill in some time. The South Fork Tuolumne sounded like a good bet, we heard it was done once or twice and had a few large drops that had been portaged by rappeling, but our beta said we could just jump the portages instead of rappeling, perfect for the hot weather.

We had hiked down a week earlier with the Knight brothers, saw that flows were too high and noted the walled in nature of the gorge. Returning, we found flows to be perfect, and dropped into the committing canyon. One long pool after the first ten footer led to a large slide that dropped around the corner. To our dismay the slide was a portage, and upon inspection there was certainly nowhere to jump, and it was way too long to rappel off our throw ropes. Looking back upsteam, the exit options looked dismal, but we attained and portaged a class II back up to the pool below the entrance falls, and commenced a very sketchy exposed climb and rappel to get back up to the lip of the falls, then roped our boats up the falls.

After this experience, most of the group hung their heads in defeat and headed different directions, but Ben is the most focused paddler I know, and not to be denied we drove to Sonora, picked up a climbing rope and returned two days later. Chris Korbulic would join us for the return mission, but the other four paddlers opted out. Dropping in again and knowing the terrain, we quickly set up the initial rappel, which dissapeared out of a view. Knowing our rope was 230′ long, but had to be doubled up, I started the rappel hoping it reached the bottom. As I worked my way down it continually got caught in trees and brush, and I wasn’t able to see if it was long enough until about 20′ from the bottom, where I observed it was long enough, but with only a few feet to spare.

Completing the rappel we were glad to see a few great falls and slides downstream, and they lead into the large drop that we could see from the "Edge of the World" viewpoint. Unfortunately the eight foot tall slide would need massive amounts of water to be good, and gorge above it would be deadly, so we embarked on one more rappel and then proceeded to paddle out through several miles of steep, mankey boulder gardens, only too glad to see the confluence with the Middle Fork Tuolumne in the late afternoon, and decided to take a rest day after being surprised at how much work the short but steep South Fork Tuolumne was.

Darin