With all that heavy rain in the last few weeks, the Victoria creeking crowd had been looking at some steep creeks close by that only run with a lot of rain. One day, Kevin, Conor and I hiked up Muir Creek and found a very steep canyon. That was remarkable because we had been driven over Muir all the time on our way to other rivers but had no idea that it had such a steep canyon just a couple hundred meters from the road. The day we scouted it first, the creek was flooding and looked….well, crazy.
A week later, Conor and I cam beack to paddle it. We had it all figured out. Hike up the deactivated logging road for a little while until we got to a bridge, put in, then paddle out to the ocean. Easy. On the hike, we stopped after about half a km to scout the waterlevel in the canyon before committing to the river. The level looked reasonable but the canyon looked pretty ugly from where we were. A lot of wood and sieves were hidden by the flooding level when we scouted it first. Still there were some sections that seemed runnable if we would walk the core section of the canyon. We decided to continue hiking to the bridge and put-in.
A few dead end roads and an hour later, we realised that the map was nothing like the actual world in this dirt-biking infested piece of overgrown clear-cut. We kept hiking and finally found a road that ended up parallel to the river. We could hear water way down in the valley from the road that was a few hundred meters above river level. I looked at Conor. Conor looked at me (No, this is not a romantic cowboy story) and we started hiking straight down to the river. Wait. I can’t really justify the word hiking for this anymore. I should say: We started the worth bushwacking possible within the borders of BC.
The Steep hill consisted of a clear cut where small Poplar trees had grown. These were then cut and build a rotten layer about 30 cm above the actual wet, slippery ground. On top of this were Ferns and a ridiculous amout of thorny brushes. We were crawling on all fours, pushing our boats in front of us and fantasising about Napalm this side of the hill. Sometimes I would push my boat and it would slide down for a couple meters. When I cam to a dead, fallen tree, I simply pushed my boat over it. Once I cleared the tree, I still saw my boat screaming and bouncing down the hill, doing sick invert moves (Using kayaker jargon here. For non kayakers this means something like: It was tumbling down the hill). After about 200 meters, I lost sight. Great. While Conor was wrestling his Blunt, I started downhill as fast as I could. I did not hear a big splash which was encouraging. The boat must have stopped before it went into the creek. When I reached the creek, I could not see the boat. So I started going back uphill and ran into Conor. He joined me in looking for my boat. We both started going back uphill at an incredibly slow speed searching under the Ferns and dead trees.
About an hour later, I almost lost hope of finding the boat. I was crawling up a giant dead old-growth tree to avoid the thorny brushed that already ripped my drysuit. The log was so slippery though that I slid off and fell on the ground. on all fours, I kept crawling uphill. right beside the log. The next time I raised my head, I was staring into the entrance of a big cave or den underneath the root-wad of the tree. Now I could hear it. So far, my full-face helmet had masked the noise. It sounded like two little babies and then I saw something moving in the den. “Oh shit, gotta go.” I was now flying through the bush at top speen hoping that I did not wake up mama black bear. I could hear Conor calling my name and told him i was OK. Just after this, I found my boat by pure luck. We took off as fast as we could, still being worried about the bear.
After paddling about 500 m of flatwater, we came to the first drop. A couple fun rapids followed before we were stopped dead by the main canyon. Looking at it from river level was very impressive and made the decision to walk easy. We decided to portage the canyon and not walk out. Both options would mean about the same effort. By portaging we would at least finish the river.
The portage took about 2 hours through thick forest but the going was not quite as bad as before. Once back on the river, we paddled 10 minutes of flatwater out to the ocean.
Although I’m pretty sure that we won’t come back anytime soon, it is good to know what the Muir canyon looks like.