Fluid Kayaks Team

Red Creek by The Dogg

After heavy rains in West Virginia, my crew and I headed out to Dolly Sods hoping to catch some sweet steep creeking action. Red Creek is one of the most fun streams in the northern part of West Virginia, boasting several slides and waterfalls through a wilderness setting. It is certainly a classic run and we were stoked to potentially have a chance to run it on a sunny June day. Joining me this day were fellow Fluid team member Seth Chapelle, Jeff Wolfram, Sean Devine, and Scott Anderson. Aside from wanting to drop a sweet creek, I was on the run from the law since they caught on to my illegal business of stealing Grumman canoes and then selling them for scrap metal. I have found over the years and my many run-ins with the law that Dolly Sods provides a nice hiding place for the fugitive scofflaw.

We arrived at the takeout and were met with a lot of speculation as to whether the water level was good. I am known for running stuff a little low and the water level definitely looked satisfactory to me. Long story short, I was adamant about paddling this stream since we had come all this way and, eventually, everyone agreed that a low water Red Creek run was better than a good flow on any other stream that would have been running that day. Besides, I had yet to bag my limit of steep creeks for the spring so the anticipation for another great run was high. Sean was dead set against it so I challenged him to a game of rock, paper, scissors and, of course, I won. When he threw down his scissors, I threw fire which you can only use once in your life but it beats everything! We drove to the putin and began the 2 mile hike across Dolly Sods to get to the creek. The revamped cheerleading squad (I added a few of the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders who were looking for some off season excitement) complained about the hike but I assured them that they would be rewarded for their efforts with some sweet lovin at the takeout. The day was perfect: the sun was shining, the temperatures were in the high 70’s, and there was a breeze so gentle that it could tie your shoe strings for you. The hike in is always a pleasant one since you are treated with beautiful views of the surrounding land. We puton the creek at what obviously going to be a scrapy level but I assured the crew that I had indeed run it lower than this (which was true). We floated on through the two mile warmup slipping down countless rocky drops and slides until the confluence with another fork and the beginning of the brown.

Once past the confluence, the creek immediately gets down to business and, at this point, you better break out your brown claw! The action starts with a long series of slides leading to a fairly steep super slide that drops 15-20 feet over 100 yards. Right afterwards is the Clapper, a 12-15 foot falls that lands directly on a rock shelf. On this day, everyone felt that the hit was going to be a little hard for a run so they walked their boats around. However, being no stranger to big waterfalls and large impacts at the bottom of them, I decided to fire it up. Too flat of an angle will hurt your back and too steep of an angle with cause a piton that will knock the leaves off your rake! I flew down the entrance slide and took a perfectly placed stroke to launch my bow out just enough to land smoothly on the slide. Oh yesh! It was SCHWEEEEET!! The next rapid is the Double Clapper, which is a cascade of 12 feet onto a slide. The way to run it is to float left of center and catch the first shelf which will launch you out onto the second shelf. Scott, Seth, and I fired it up, all with picture perfect lines. We continued downstream, treated with many steep rocky drops and slides.

Soon, we were at the horizon line of a scrapy 12 foot falls that is pretty difficult to launch off of. Most of us went pretty deep off of it, including Seth’s near over the handle bars pogo off the drop. Paddling across the pool, we knew we were in for a major treat where the creek flows over a 200+ yard slide ending in a 5 foot drop. The next several drops are improvements from flooding that cleared out poorly place boulders and created 2 new rapids, both of which are very sweet. The second one left a 6 foot boof that is one of the best boofs anywhere in the state! We all came down and launched picture perfect boofs that would have brought a smile to the face of a person who likes to watch boofs! The constant barrage of BOOF sounds had the people of Laneville thinking that they were under artillery fire. Some hikers in Dolly Sods thought that some of the bombs left behind from World War II testing were blowing up!

More steep rocky drops and slides carried us to the biggest rapid of the run, the Devil’s Cauldron. This rapid contains a 50 yard twisting slide that ends in a 15 foot waterfall. A rock recently fell off the lip of the falls and is now perched in the landing, making the drop a whole lot more difficult to run correctly. The idea is that you want to approach the lip with a lot of speed and launch out over the rock in the landing. After scouting, there was no doubt that I would run this drop. As the Greatest Kayak Who Has Ever Lived, I can not disappoint you, the faithful and anticipating reader, and portage any rapids. Whenever a thought of portaging enters my mind, I think about that kid out there who is reading this story. That kid who wants to grow up and be just like the Dogg, laughing in the face of fear and acing every drop, no matter how scary or difficult. You see to that kid, I am more than a great kayaker, I am a hero. Can I disappoint that kid? Nossir, I can not. So, I started on the right side of the slide, where it is a little scrapy but gives more of a straight shot so you don’t scrub speed where the slide twists against the right bank. I gathered up a ton of speed, partly because of the high speed slide and partly because my new Medium Solo is a pretty fast creek boat. I got to the lip of the falls and threw down a big boof stroke and launched out over the whole landing zone. I flew so far in the air that a couple of the hikers thought that there was an alien spacecraft flying through the gorge! Oh Yesh! It was NICHE!! The crowd erupted and the cheerleaders went into a frenzy! I walked back up and discussed the line with Seth, who liked the looks of things. He decided that he was going to bust out the brown claw and run it too. He got in his boat and came down with a very nice run as well.

The remainder of the run brought more slides and a nice cascade called the Finale before things petered out to rocky rapids for the remaining couple miles to Laneville. This area can get sort of scrapy in spots but no amount of scraping was going to remove the permagrin from my face! Nossir, Dr. 90210 was going to have to perform plastic surgery to remove this smile from my face! We arrived at Laneville tired but very pleased from a great day. I think most of the group agreed that we had done the best possible run for the day and we celebrated this awesome occasion with a Hellbender Burrito in Davis. Afterwards, I took the cheerleaders on a trip to Vegas for some gambling and other extracurricular activities. But, that is another story that you won’t get to hear since what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except for STD’s, they come back with you. But I digress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBEBhCXLUEk