This was just a quick attempt to get a bit of SoCal boating in since our gear was already dirty and wet from our truncated Salt River trip. Being mid-week we found the roads and trails happily devoid of the LA weekend riffraff. It was also pleasantly warm. Heather and I checked both forks of the San Gabriel. East Fork was surprisingly too low to be boatable, apparently all the flow still locked up as snow up in the headwaters. Based on the view from the trailhead bridge I could tell the bottom two miles of the West Fork from Bear Creek to the OHV area should be a boatable ~270 cfs and so that was the plan. We walked the road one mile to Bear Creek and put-in just below the bridge. The long first rapid was a nice warm-up and so we actually carried our boats back up to run a second lap of it. We got suckered into the blind corner rapid and got caught off-guard by a log that was not there a month ago. I relocated the log, reopening the rapid. The river had decent coverage at this flow. We bounced and splashed our way through the following three-ish rapids to the footbridge. Here I managed to convince Heather to continue on, a new section of the river for her. We portaged the limbo log rapid but enjoyed everything else. I left Heather to sort and dry gear roadside at the OHV area while I ran up the road to retrieve the car. We piled in and headed back for Riverside, beating the worst of rush hour traffic. Another two miles logged; so far river miles have been hard work in 2024.
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