At all times now I am consciously aware of the rare condition of flowing water in southern California and have a nagging need to catch as much of it as possible! This weekend I was looking for a mellow-ish packraft day trip locally and knew the East and West Forks of the San Gabriel should be running so that seemed like a good direction to head. With the previous trip to Bear Creek we had ended on about a mile of the West Fork. In contrast to the more continuous barreling freight train of the East Fork, the West Fork seemed to have more discrete rapids with pool-drop sections and a less pushy flow. There is about a mile below our takeout that should be boatable before hitting the reservoir and the West Fork Rd to Cogswell Dam would allow us to scout the entirety of the river above Bear. We snagged a choice parking spot at the West Fork Trailhead and strolled to the river to have a look. It was brownish and certainly less flow than on our Bear Creek descent weeks earlier but perfectly boatable and a friendly flow for getting Heather on the river.
We loaded packs and started hiking along the foot/bike traffic only West Fork Rd, scouting features as we went. Some small branch and log obstructions I was able to remove then and there with a small handsaw. For a road it was a very pleasant hike with the river always to our side, mossy shaded cliffs, views of distant slopes of wildflowers, and at least a dozen cascading waterfalls, including several that plummeted right onto the road. The upward scouting turned into a game of Simon Says of sorts, where we tried to remember the sequence of particular wood obstacles we would face on the way down and the distinguishing features that would cue us in before it was too late to react; the further up we went the more obstacles stacked, taxing our memory. At a couple places we cheated by placing cairns at portages that we could knock down as we returned. Whenever something looked annoying or like a portage we would see another nice section above, luring us to hike onward. We hiked up about as far as I could have hoped, to where I previously parked to do landslide fieldwork, 4.5 miles up from the trailhead. Upstream was a risky limbo log spanning a rapid and so this seemed like a satisfactory place to put on.
It was a beautiful sunny day and the water was fairly warm so I somewhat hesitantly put on my drysuit, wishing I had given myself a bathing suit option. We quickly got into the swing of things and navigated the first few remembered obstacles with ease. At one tricky sequence with a split channel we had some miscommunication and I led us down the bumpier bushier channel but otherwise things went fairly smoothly. We had some nice straight riffled sections with open views thanks to the abundant dead trees and some tighter turns that closed us into shaded tree tunnels.
Heather portaged a few of the things that I ended up running. Given the incredible logjams we saw it was amazing just how boatable this run was. I ended up portaging four times, three of which were short detours around river wide strainer logs, and one longer portage with a full stack of logs clogging a couple hundred feet of the river. A particular scenic highlight was the forested section above Bear Creek with some nice waterfalls plunging in riverside (frontispiece) that felt like it could have been in the lush Pacific Northwest.
Upon arrival at Bear Creek about 100 cfs of crystal clear water was added and the rapids downstream had a bit more punch to them. One of these Heather portaged and another she pinballed her way down but to her credit she went the whole run without flipping. She was feeling tired and satisfied when we eddied out at the parking lot footbridge and after some discussion I would run the remaining mile down to the OHV area solo and she would meet me with the car. This bonus section had some great rapids. The steepest rapid on the whole run had a protruding log I stopped to saw, opening the fun rapid for descent. Our timing worked out well with Heather beating me to my takeout by a couple minutes. Our hike up the West Fork took about 2hrs to go 4.5 miles while scouting, while my 5.5 mile run down took a little over 2 hours. Not a bad little SoCal outing. Before heading out of the range we detoured over to look at the East Fork. It had a wonderfully swollen flow of crystal blue snowmelt and looked great! I'm hungry for more river! Thanks to Heather for snapping some photos of me while portaging and letting me check out the lower extra credit section of the river.
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