So this is a short story about the easiest exploratory run ever. No, not the Tsangpo. Some pepole might think the Tsangpo was the easiest exploratory boating since Inuuit came up with the kayak thing. But they are wrong. The San Juan River on Vancouver Ilsand was the easiest. I was lucky enough to be able to paddle this river with Laura, Albert and Braden.

The whole day was kind of unusual. It was mid November and we drove up the old Port Renfrew Road past Koksilah. The wierd thing was the blue sky. This is November on Vancouver Island. There is no sun in November on Vancouver Island. At least not when you’re boating. So we got changed and everyone is basking in the sun and stuff. This combined with me being late and some other complications (a flat tire that is) caused a late start. We put on the river just past 11. Every sane paddler on the island would think one thing with this late a start: Hike fest in the dark. We went ahead anyways.

The next strange thing was being blinded by the sun. We paddled right into it for a while. Reminder: It was November.

The run started out pretty fun but the level was boney. Not bad for a first time down a constricted canyon. After a kilometer we camo to a drop that could be seen from the shuttle road. This drop was actually 2 15 feet waterfalls and some other nastyness that we walked without thinking to much since we did not have time. We than ran a trashy boulder garden and a couple small ledges and eddied out. Enthusiastic gesticulations by Braden made it fairly obvious that there was something worth looking at. The drop was a slide at about 70 degrees dropping 15 vertical metres. Definitely runnable but much nicer at higher water. We walked again. This walk took about an hour. We walked along the left, then lowered the boats into the canyon.

After this we realised that we covered about 1.5 of the 4 kilometers and had only just over 2 hours daylight left. We discussed the situatuion and contemplated to hike out. Decision was made to keep going. Fast. I gotta say that we were extrmely lucky that the river turnt out to be very friendly. We ran many steep boulder gardens. Some were fairly long but most were short steep stretches into nice pools. After a while we cam to spot where we could see a clear-cut from the river. We had scouted this a while back and then knew where we were.

At this point it was a quarter past three. About an hour of light left. We still had about 3 kilomters left in the run. I thought that we would be hiking to get out of the canyon FOR SURE. There were a few really fun drops and lots of easy boulder gardens before we came to a big horizon line. I was pretty pessimistic when I looked at it. It was a pretty clean waterfall and then after a short pool another horizon line. Braden however thought it looked all good and went ahead and ran it. We all followed quickly and found the next drop to be a perfectly runnable chute and then the river eased up.

We kept paddling and encountered some other drops. At 4:30 we reached the bridge. Just after sunset. I gotta say that we got away with murder on this trip. We did not have much time and a long canyon to paddle. We were pretty damn lucky that the river was so easy to scout and that the drops were manageble. We all pretty much expected to have to hike out in the dark.

Thanks to Laura, Albert and Braden for a great trip.