To follow up on my post on Thorne Brook, today I took the liberty of hiking down the creek at base flow. There is a logical and legal put in at a bridge and immediately the creek is class 3/3+ boulder gardens with small encounters with bed rock, after this first warm up gorge ends the creek flattens out and becomes a marsh ladle with beaver dams. I swam, waded, crawled, and bush wacked through this area, which reminded me heavily of Frodo, Samwise, and Gollums trek through the dead marshes in Lord of the Rings. I was relieved when this ended and the creek reformed and picked back up to class 2/3 gradient. After a while the creek got steeper showing off nice class 3/4 boulder garden and little bedrock slide rapids for a good ways. This section was mostly devoid of wood. Seeing the road return near the creek signals you are at your last escape point or the main reason you put on this creek in the first place. Dropping around a corner through a boulder sluice the river becomes class 5. This is the top of a very long bed rock slide which flows unobstructed for a 1/4 mile or so. It drops steeply at likely hair raising speed loosing 50ft or more before the slide levels out some what but continues its Mach speed descent. The creek is completely walled in down the slide, escape impossible, there is one decent eddy in there but you cant climb out from this point. A short ways of more sliding from this point is a 25-30ft cascade with no way to portage. There are small eddies by the lip, but there is no way to portage. After down climbing wet 5.8 the gradient eases up and you are in an amphitheater with towering rock walls on the left and the massive WB Farmington river reservoir retaining wall on the right. There is more bed rock of a class 2/3 nature down to the final manky 30ft cascade at the confluence with the Farmington. You would take out at the put in for the class 2 section of the Farmington.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 22:56:43 +0000
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