The All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting California River Blog

As you know by now, water numbers across golden (well, still pretty green actually,) California are perfectly normal this year–which is perfectly lovely news for whitewater sports enthusiasts. 

The story on the Kaweah River, in Southern California, is a little confusing.  If you google water stats for the Kaweah you’ll see numbers that are a little higher than what we reported in our “flow prediction report” a little while back.  Here’s why:  Snow water content in the Kaweah Watershed is at around 120% of normal this year. However, since 2007 was pretty dry, the ground and plant life is prepped to soak up a lot of the run-off this spring.  This means less will flow into the river, which is why we are predicting that this will be a “normal” rather than a “high water” year.

The reason this is still good news for Southern California rafters is that the 2008 season on the Kaweah will be longer than it was last year, when there weren’t very many weekends the river was running at great flows.  We think the river will peak sometime around the Memorial Day Holiday weekend.

If you’ve never rafted the class IV whitewater of the Kaweah River Canyon, check out the video we shot there last summer to give you a taste……office cubicle one day, screamin’ whitewater the next.  Cowboy up!

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These guys are good at tracking flows… they’ve gone with us year after year and know just when to start calling the reservations office and ask about which of our Spring rivers are running when. So it wasn’t a surprise to me that for our first of only two weekends of water on the Kaweah this year, we saw many of AO’s most frequent floaters.

Willy, our beloved German guest who came rafting with us somewhere around 20 times last year, had never seen the Kaweah until last weekend. Paired in a boat with fellow enthusiast Dan, who actually joined us for guide school this year, he commented later that it had been one of his favorite days on the river ever. This, of course, following a beautiful grand finale in Holiday Rapid which included both a perch and a surf. (Holiday rapid is one of my favorites… it starts out with a very technical backpaddle into and “airplane turn” that takes the front of your boat just barely past a huge hole… and then doesn’t let up with the technical moves and big whitewater until a few hundred yards downstream. Translation? Lots of opportunity for plans B, C and D to go into effect.)

As for myself for my first weekend back on the Kaweah this year? (more…)

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The theme on the Kaweah River these past few weekends has been all about team bonding and brotherhood. With two fraternities doing trips (one from UCLA and one from USC), and then a masters women’s rugby team joining us this last Sunday, we were prepared for some pretty rowdy and crazy days.

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On Friday night, it took hours to get any food or service at our favorite restaurant in town, and strange animals started making noises at three in the morning. Then on Saturday, Brook “Lead Foot” Johnson found herself hiding from a very angry campground manager who was covered in the dust kicked up from her truck, and bad river karma was passed on to an unwitting guide through a harmless-looking tent. What in the world was going on in Three Rivers?!!

As may have been gathered, our first weekend back on the Kaweah wasn’t, as they say, smooth as “buttuh”. Don’t get me wrong- we had a great time seeing each other and the river again. It’s just that there were a few small kinks to make the weekend that much more interesting.

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I know there was a boat here somewhere…

As promised, Thursday is weekly pictures and quotes day! The above and following pictures are a few of my favorites from Mark Reiner’s 2005 season shots on the Kaweah River near Sequoia National Park.

[Click here to see last week's shots from the North Stanislaus.]

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We’ve all heard the typical “pump-up” songs at sporting events. A basketball game without Queen’s “We Will Rock You” is just wrong, and what football game could survive without asmall sampling of Guns and Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”? Well I would like to note a very worthy song that has been left out of these “I’m so hardcore”-collections.

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This feedback is from Gwen M. of Watsonville, CA. Gwen joined us on a 1-Day spring rafting trip on the Kaweah River.

Brian ,we always have a great time with you guys!!!!!

It was great to be on a new river, especially since we have wanted to do Kaweah for the past couple years but couldn’t get our act together in time! I would love to go again with higher water but we had a great time! Brad was our guide and it was great to see him again. He has never been our guide before although we have been on the same rivers. It was great to see his style and how he is similar/different from our other guides. And we had fun!

The rapids were great… what a series of back to back challenges and the technicality was fun also. A bit like Cherry Creek in all the rocks to avoid. Gorgeous country although the river doesn’t have to much time to look around until the end. We had a great time doing the rock slides. Our companions in the raft were good as well. Food yummy… very different being at a restaurant as we all slowly dripped all over the place! Swimmers… oh, yeah! We actually all went swimming in our raft at the end of Suicide Falls. I think Brad said someone took pictures of our very slow-motion, inevitable flip. We all recovered well, in fact, most of us were right next to the raft since it happened so slowly. No panicking, no problems, easy to recover from. Really makes you appreciate how just a few inches changes everything during a rapid!
Overall, TONS OF FUN!! I really don’t see how you could improve on anything. Looking forward to Tuolumne and Cherry Creek next Gwen

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