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The Real Shit By Chip Powell

"Live for those moments of clarity, when you were totally committed to the line. All those days of friendship and worry and concentration and smiles melted together into the best feeling..." D.Ammons



Chippy and Lyle go boating: The Redearth creek edition.

So I'm having one of the FTW moments when the only thing to do is to go paddling on something that stirs the soul and gets the blood flowing again, the hunger for quality water and a bit of exploration to see if I 'm still breathing. Leafing through the guidebook during the week I come across Redearth creek. Looks promising, possibly some fun water with a few harder bits thrown in as a bit of a test. OK there is a bit of a carry in but Col has been attempting to encourage me to get fitter so.......

Consider soloing it but on this occasion I decide I want to share it as it does look rather fun. Consult the list of usual suspects. Call Colan, maybe not ("I don't feel like carrying my boat 6km to carry it 6km back"), Wade is in Vancouver (bit far for a daytrip to AB), then in an innate stroke of brilliance call Calgarys' other squirt boater. Lyle is keen and has earned enough kayaker credits to escape for the day. A brief chat and he decides we should take his van as the demonic diesel (F250) has transmogrified into the demonic sauna and has a new trick of spraying the passengers furry bits/nether regions with scalding coolant and he does n't consider this appealing.

Get an Alpine start (0915) from Chips on Sunday morning and head out along #1 to Redearth. Weather is looking good, nice and sunny, just what we need for a 6km carry.

Arrive at the carpark about noon and strip down to carrying gear, to the accompaniment of comments from grockles regarding the steepness of the river, the rockiness and the lack of vehicular access to the top. We sympathise as we rig the boats for a stroll.

Being passed in the first few hundred metres by mountain bikers we consider the development of the wheel as a possibility for the future of primitive man. Being neo luddites we decide to have no truck with new fangled inventions, and carry on schlepping.

After a brief 6 km we get on at the bridge by the campsite and start working our way down. This is quite entertaining, the water is not massively hard apart from the wood. Oh my, the wood. It is as if the creek has been a demo run by the Redearth chapter of the Demented Beavers Creek Reclamation group. Not just logs down, rather stands of trees.

We try and portage as little as possible as we are boaters not beavers, but some times we just have to. Although some of the other spots make for sparkling entertainment, breaking out into a surging eddy behind a rock halfway down a class 3 rapid to back ones kayak under a log with vertical branches spearing down into water a boat width apart is not an unusual move on this run. It's even funnier when the river surges just as LT is sliding under one of these and gets squashed into his deck as if by the hand of god. Lyles revenge is watching an attempt to jump a log when I catch a little branch stub which turns me and pins me. He has to come and pull me off. This is not a run for the faint hearted; indeed the original fairground precept "the timorous need not apply" is apt. In places we boof, rail slide and limbo to get round the wood, and that's just in the space of 4 feet. We are pulling tricks of fifty years of river running, scouting from holes and micro eddies, clutching twigs and branches to spot a clean line to the next half boat sized blip in the craziness.

Downstream the gradient steepens and the walls close in. We decide to stop and have a look just above Jugbuster falls. I'm glad we did as it's not as though the falls themselves are hard enough but also that there are terminal trees down between there and Railslide. This bit is probable death on a stick.

Hop back in the pool below Railslide and down into the next canyon. The problem with scouting from 15m above is that it's hard to get an idea of the size of holes in plan view. All you can really see is obvious trees (always good to avoid). The Gripper is a fine demonstration of this as I accelerate down this 8m slide to encounter a five foot drop/hole thing at the bottom. I hit so hard that I'm slammed back onto the rear deck and my helmet is torn off. Ooops. Being helmetless in a vertical walled canyon between V+/ VI drops leaves me feeling very vulnerable. Lyle howls down behind me, gets swallowed and spat out fast. There is surprising force in there. Fun though. We catch my helmet, it's survived but the buckle has blown (turns out to be UV deterioration).

Bob down the remainder of the run blissed out by the fun whitewater and the knowledge there are no terminal jams before the get out, just super prettiness and the odd drop. It's a wonderful wonderful run. Proper creeking, a good test of technique with a bit of challenge to stir the corpuscles. At the get out we are truly alive and, for today, sated.

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