What a day. Classic Canada West Cost exploration. So Shayne had scouted the upper Oyster here on Vancouver Island and said good things about it. The best was that it looked like it could be run very low, down to 10 cms. Now this is pretty critical since here on the Island most things are dry in June but the Oyster might be runable into July. No question that we had to have a look at that river.

On Saturday, Jakub and I met Shayne in Nanimo at 10 am and then headed to the Oyster. Once we were past the Puntledge River, it was raining pretty hard for mid June. That made us happy. We drove up the river right logging road and stashed a bike (read: threw it into the ditch) at the normal put-in for the play run. We then headed up the river to a point, in the middle of the woods, no river was anywhere near, where Shayne said that that was it. On the drive up it became pretty obvious that hiking out of the river would at best suck the a** off dead racoons.

We got changed in rainy but unusual warm weather (compared to the winter paddling conditions we are used to) and started hiking down to the river. Since it looked pretty steep on the map with up to 10 % (530 fpm) gradient, we also took climbing harnesses and I carried the long 100′ spectra bag. I can already say that I was hating that thing only a few hours later.

The hike down to the river took a while and we were warmed up enough to jump into the pool at the put-in. The canyon was stunning. Deep and remote with big cliffs on both sides and looking upstream, the Oyster looked steep and had lots of water in it. There was another Creek at the spont where we put in that comes from Mt. Washington but the name escaped me. The Creek was almost as big as the Oyster.

We started paddling the first stretch of slow moving river but came to the first horizon line after only about half an hour. An when I say horizon line, I mean substantial horison line. The left shore was probably a 100 m high vertical cliff and the river droped completely out of sight. After getting out of the boat, I still could not see anything other that spray coming up. Clearly, this was the waterfall that was marked in the 20k map. Shayne and I started scouting and were frustated by the images we saw. It was a massive set of cascades with a lot of water. No way we would paddle that. There were sieves everywhere and inbetween the sives lots of pin spots spiced up the vertical madness.

We finally came to a pool and swam through it just to find that the gradient would not let up after the left turn, where the river disappeared between vertical walls.

Luckily, we had a close look at the 20k map just before we put on and Shayne propoosed to walk the whole bend in the river inbehind the big cliff on the left, where the map indicated a low saddle that would be relatively easy to cross. It turned out to be an OK portage even though Jakub had a hard time because he fell on the before scout and hurt his knee. We roped the boats to the saddle through a steep forested slope and then pretty much tossed the boats down the other side, where Shaynes Jefe surprised with some entertaining moves.


Once down at river level again, we saw the next drop, where the whole river disappeared under a house sized boulder that blocked the whole canyon. We managed to walk this drop and ended up in the pool below. By this time, the statistics of the day were as follows: It was 3 pm, we had covered 2 km of flatwater, walked for about 2 hours, and had run not a single drop.


We got out on different sides to scout the next drop. The first two drops I saw looked fun. Then, again, the river went into a canyon with overhanging walls, no shoreline whatsoever. The entrance was a drop with maybe 5 m vertical difference, a manky lead-in, and wood in the middle. Both sides were massive cliffs, probably 150 m high. I could see the river disappear around the corner. What was in the canyon, we did not know. Once I met up with the other guys on the other shore, we discussed our options. They were quite simple. We could try to hike around the cliff on river left and try to get an idea of what would await us in the canyon. The scout would have taken several hours. The other option was to hike out, which would take several hours as well. The caracter of the river had been so trashy that we decided to walk out. We ran the one drop before the canyon and started roping out if the canyon. It sucked. There were zillions of no-see-ums, it was hot, humid rainy weather and the slope was very steep. Jakub cracked the line of the day when he said something like: “You know Guys, I am not pissed off because of the hike out but I am pissed off because I forgot the rum!”. After two hours, we reached an old abandoned logging road that got us back to the mainline. Once on the main line, I started jogging the shuttle.

That was the upper Oyster. After we got changed, we scouted this other creek (I call it Piggy-Back Creek) and found a very promising canyon, an apparently clean 30+ feet waterfall, and ripe wild Strawberries.