The Lower White Salmon's Secrets

Much like the scientific community, the whitewater community often will surprise you with its boundless generosity and afford you an opportunity that you otherwise may have never had.  This blog was started to satisfy a requirement for an undergraduate course I'm taking in Water Sciences - and I chose mostly to talk about the Deschutes basin as a general topic.  However, during the course of the project Wet Planet Whitewater (www.wetplanetwhitewater.com) - a commercial rafting and kayaking company that I took my guide courses with - sent out an email blast looking for participants to give them feedback on the newly opened "lower" White Salmon river.  They were going to take us down the entire river, and feed us lunch.  For Free.  All we had to do was fill out there survey at the end to give them feedback and help them determine if they are going to run this stretch of river commercially.

Let me just say that again...for free.  Lunch included!

Needless to say, I was pretty happy to accept.  This kind of full day trip usually runs over $100, and I already knew the company was a classy outfit.

So I signed up.  Jenna and I showed up at the Wet Planet headquarters in Husum, WA at about 9:15 am after a good Americano and breakfast burrito in the charming hamlet of White Salmon.  It was a bright day, promising heat like August does.

We suited up, and after the customary warnings, and instructions on how to not fall into the water - we hit the river.  The first part of the day was the "normal" upper part of the river - which was amazing as always, but I really want to focus here on what amounts to one of the first ever commercial runs on the Lower White Salmon river - from Husum to the mouth of the Columbia River.

This run was only possible because of that happens in this fantastic video shot by Andy Maser for National Geographic



The destruction and removal of Condit Dam drained a lake and returned the White Salmon to its original form after nearly 100 years in captivity.  After the sediment shifted, shifted again, and the morphology of the river settled, river runners began to venture into this new (old) landscape and portions of the river that had been underwater for 100 years were seen returning to their century old forms.

Getting to be part of the first commercial runs into this canyon was one that still strikes me as amazing.  I feel very lucky indeed to have been a part of it, and the things that I saw are so consistent with the material that I have been exposed to at OSU in the water science and engineering program that I am beginning to feel that my choices have all lead to that moment.  

We saw Steel bend, and just after Steelhead Falls. (pictured below).  We saw...are you ready for this...salmon above the dam site, something that shows the resiliency of ecosystems.  We saw waterfalls that nobody alive had seen.  There was surprisingly little evidence of the dam itself, it seemed that PacifiCorp did a good job removing the dam.

"Steelhead Falls Rapid" Image used courtesy Wet Planet Whitewater

I could post more images, but honestly I want to encourage people to go see it for themselves.  Particularly those of you in the Geosciences, this is an opportunity to see an ecosystem in repair, both from natural services as well as remediation efforts.  When/where will you ever have this chance again?  There is no way to know!

At any rate, we finished the trip at the mouth of the Columbia and got on the bus to head back and fill out our surveys.  I was honest about the trip, it was great, but the cost needs to be right and; I stressed this several times - they need to make clear the ecosystem issues that the river is facing and help people understand how unique it is to run a newly free flowing river.  This was the part that was magic to me.