The All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting California River Blog

The end is nigh for North Stan rafting trips this year!  Based on the snowpack in the North Stan watershed and the weather forecast we think there are only two more weekends of raftable flows on this outstanding class IV run.  What I’m sayin’ is, it’s time to quit yer hemmin’ and hawin’ and make your plans before it’s too late. 

Don’t forget you can watch our fabulous North Stan rafting video to see what this river is all about.  Also check out our photo gallery from this year’s SNOWY STAN trips, too!  (Don’t you worry, no more snow to contend with for the last trips of the year)

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Good news for spring rafters!  The strong snowpack from winter 2009, combined with this week’s warming trend, mean water levels are rising on springtime rafting trips.  This might mean free-flowing rivers like the Merced will have slightly shorter seasons, but conditions are wonderful right now.   It’s really an even trade in the end–especially if you’re looking for high water, big hydraulics, and powerful currents.   Dam-controlled rivers have plenty of water for long, solid seasons.

Be sure to catch the North Fork of the Stanislaus while flows are up there.  (After the melt is over, the North Folk will be too low for rafting trips.)  Don’t forget the South Fork of the American either–the hills are still green, wildflowers are still out, and higher flows make the South Fork extra fun.  Faster spring water also makes whole river trips–rafting all the way from Chili Bar to Salmon Falls–a fantastic day.  If you usually raft the South Fork in the summer months, this time of year will give you a whole new perspective!

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The North Stanislaus River flows only during a short period in the springtime, usually in late April and May. Unlike other Class IV Sierra runs, the North Stan is a high elevation run (nearly 5000 feet at put-in), lined by redwood trees and filled with enormous granite boulders. The North Stan is one of the most picturesque rivers in California and becomes a favorite run for anyone who gets the opportunity to raft there. We recently launched a North Stanislaus rafting video produced by Ben Zupo, one of the camera men for the hit TV show, The Deadliest Catch. You can watch it here:

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We all thought we had seen the last of the Stanislaus River for this year, but lately it’s had a few surprises in store for us…

We had left the North Stan for “dead” this year– dried out, done, finito. We were sure, a few weekends ago, that we had seen the last of run-able flows on that river, and that this year’s incredibly huge snowpack had finally exhausted itself. But then, being the nerdy river addicts we are, we did what we do at least once every few weeks: went online and just for the heck of it looked up the flows for all of California’s rivers… (more…)

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Wrap (n): The less-than-ideal situation in which a boat is held against a rock or boulder in the river for an indeterminant amount of time by the force of the current.

When I and seven other guides got to the North Stanislaus this last Sunday morning and hiked down to look at the boat that was wrapped in the first rapid, we were amazed. I personally had never seen a wrap anything like it before. Most of the boat was under water, with a hole backing up on it and pounding it further and further against the rock. Literally half of the boat was wrapped around the left side of the boulder, and the other half wrapped around the right, giving no advantage to pulling from either direction. Of course, the boat had had two days by that point in time to get itself good and stuck: The initial wrap had actually occured Friday afternoon, when four boats set off to do All-Outdoors’ last trip on the Stan before flows dropped to a level too low to run. In the very first rapid of the day, Beginner’s Luck, two of those four boats wrapped. One of them came off fairly easily, and the other one,well, the other one is still there…

On Sunday, eight of us (none of whom had been on that trip on Friday) met at 9 am on the North Stanislaus with a lot of ropes, pulleys, carabiners, and throw bags. Our mission? To recover that wrapped boat and bring it home. (more…)

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We may have seen peak flows on the North Stanislaus this last weekend. It was incredibly fun, but definitely a more challenging, and at times crazy, day. (I think that the river had just as much fun with us as we had with it!) That said, I’ll let these pictures do the rest of the talking.

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I hereby declare that Thursday on this blog shall be deemed our Weekly Pictures and/or Quotes day! I still have quite a few of Mark Reiner’s Photos to share, [see earlier post for explanation] and when the season starts up we’ll have a lot more pictures to choose from. As for the quotes, every once in a while one of us says something so classic that it would be a crime not to publicize and otherwise thouroughly embarrass them.

So today I continue in revealing some of my favorites from Mark Reiner’s new collection of photographs from the 2005 rafting season. Today’s pictures are from the North Stanislaus. [The order in which I reveal these, by the way, has to do with the timing of each river's season. Both the North Fork, which I showcased last week, and the North Stan, are early spring rivers that tend to dissappear faster than some of the others.]

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