Selway River Trip Report, Paradise Guard Sation to Selway Falls

Prelude – June 13
“The Selway is one of the most challenging whitewater rives in the United States.  The rivers course takes the floater through the 1,239,840 acre Selway Bitterroot Wilderness.  Most of the large wilderness is passable only by horseback, foot, or boat.  From Paradise Guard Station a the mouth of White Cap Creek to Selway Falls the river drops an average of 28 feet per mile creating a very technical whitewater floating experience.  On the Selway there are several Class III and IV rapids which require a high level of whitewater skill and experience.”  USDA Forest Service

We dropped off the kids at grandma’s house (thanks mom!) picked up Ramon and left Salt Lake at 1:00 PM.  After a close call with a police cruiser on I15 near Dell, MT, we had dinner at the Wicked Felina Café in Lincoln, MT (one of the best chicken burritos on the planet).  Lincoln is located in Big Hole a huge high mountain plain with mountains towering above on all sides.  We learned that there are about 300 people that live in Big Hole with 10,000 haystacks, 4 months of warm weather a year and that all high school aged kids are bussed one hour each way to Dillon MT for school.   Paradise apparently has it’s price.  We pulled into Bud & Shirley’s Hotel in Darby, MT about 8:00PM where we found most of our crew.  Darby was a busy little city strewn with casinos and bars.  Our hotel was spartan and smelled of cigarette smoke, but it had great diner.  We were all excited and talked in the rain in the parking lot for a few hours before turning in.

Day 1, June 14 – Paradise to Goat Creek
Breakfast was served at 7:00 AM.  After setting up the car shuttle (Karen Kidd, Selway River Shuttles in Darby - recommended) and packing our bags in the trailer, we were off to the Paradise Guard Station.  Including our stop at the ranger station to pick up our permit, it took over two hours on dirt and narrow roads to get to the boat ramp.  When we first saw the river we thought it looked too low to be runnable, but as we drove on the dirt road to the put-in the river picked up volume from some tributaries.

It took another two hours and lunch to get on the river.  The measuring stick read 2.5, which is on the low side of a moderate run.   Our party was 15 strong (Trey was not able to come due to a delayed flight), with 4 rafts (2 Riken 16 foot self bailers, and a 15 and 16 foot Hyside self-bailer), 2 duckies, and 4 kayaks (Ramon, Gary, Erik, Rebecca, Mark, Peter, Dave, Trey, Eric, Dusty, Todd, Brady, Brett, Mitch, and Steve).  Brady was the only person with prior experience running the Selway.  Gary provided most of our gear.  Thanks Gary!!  None of us can say enough good things about Gary. 

Only Brady had run the Selway before, last year at twice the volume.  So we all had a meaningful trip ahead of us.  Brett had a GPS unit that he let me use which combined with topo maps gave us a fairly good idea of our location on the river.

The river was initially fairly boney.  It was difficult to look away for any meaningful amount of time without hitting a rock, but it was moving quite quickly and picked up volume with each of the many tributaries.  Our first major rapid was named Slalom Slide.  It was a river left run through narrow, large rocks with some fun waves.  After Slalom Slide, Gary, a seasoned veteran of many Main and Middle Fork Salmon trips said, “That was the hardest rapid I have ever run!  How are we supposed to do the rest!”  We all got a good laugh from his comment.  Galloping Gertie was next – another river left run along a wall.  Washer Woman was blocked by a horizontal tree stump that was hung up across the rocks and guarded the entrance to the rapid’s main channel.  This log lead to a tricky river right path between large rocks.  Brady, Mitch, Steve, and Brett (the Kayakers) stopped mid rapid to direct traffic – which was very helpful.  Gary made it look easy, while I missed the line and bounced down a big pour over (doh!).   At mile nine after a few more rapids we pulled over at North Star Ranch to regroup, have a snack, and discuss where we wanted to camp.  There was talk of going to mile White Tail Flats at mile 16, but it was already 4:00 and I suspected that many of us were ready to find something closer.  Just after we pushed off again we hit Ping Pong Alley where a widening of the river and an abundance of rocks made for an interesting rock garden. I could see no channel or logical way through so I started paddling forward, hoping that if I did hit a rock that my momentum would get me over.  It turned out to be no sweat. 

We pulled into Goat Creek Camp at Mile 11 just before 5:00 and found the site small, but accommodating and decided to stay.  Rebecca, Ramon and I had dinner duty so we got busy getting the kitchen set up and started cooking our Chinese teriyaki chicken and vegetable stir-fry – a high nutrition content meal after a big day.

The river today was lined with Ponderosa and Cedar, each with moss strewn from their branches and that literally grew out of the river bed.  Many of the trees had fallen over creating 100 foot long pieces of driftwood.  The forest had obvious places where wildfire had scarred the landscape. After dinner we walked a mile down the pack trail to scout out Goat Creek Rapid.  It was fun to hike and scout the rapid with my dad.  He set a fast pace on the trail and even though I am in the middle of training for a marathon, I had a hard time keeping up. The river was considerably larger at Goat Creek than at the launch site. 

Rebecca got in a good float today, reading her book in between rapids and lounging on Brady’s air mattress that we tied to the front of the frame.

Trey took two swims out of one of the duckies today.  We set up another campfire in the fire pail and talked until 11:00.

Day 2, June 15 – Goat Creek to Tony Point
The morning was cool and after a great breakfast from Mark and Brady we packed up and got going at just after 10:00 am.  Goat Creek rapid was incredibly fun – like a slalom course, in and out of rocks, back and forth across river right of the river, with Winnebago sized rocks (took the shoot between the second and third Winnebago) at the end.  Everyone had big smiles at the bottom.  We saw tents at the Shearer Guard Station, but otherwise no signs of life.  A ranger was taking pictures of us from the bridge at the Selway Lodge – apparently making sure that we did not have more people that our permit allowed and that we were sufficiently geared up.  We pulled over for a minute so he could some good shots of us just to be kind.  The Selway Lodge looked nice and a large two engine aircraft on its runway took off shortly after we floated by.    We stopped for 5 minutes at the White Tail Flats campground, which looked really nice, but I think we were all happy we stopped when we did the day before.  Rodeo Rapid was fun, river right with lots of compression waves.  We pulled over for lunch at a white sandbar after Rodeo.  As Mitch was getting out of his Kayak on the white sandy beach he said, “can you think of any place that you would rather be right now?”  Nope..  We were all really excited to be there.  At lunch Dave pulled out the paddleball set and we had a continuous hit contest.  Brett and Todd won with 52 continuous hits. 

Green Eggs was pretty straightforward.  We stopped and scouted Ham (Class IV).  There was a large wash over at the top and then a hard pull to river center-left to avoid a larger pointed wrap-rock.  Peter bounced off the big rock innocently with the rest of us making it down without issue.   There were 4 fun class II’s to the Tony Point Campground.  Our map was somewhat confusing about the location of the campground – which turned out to be river left, after the pack bridge, and overlooked the confluence of Moose Creek.  “This campground is as good as it gets,” exclaimed Mark at dinner.  Mitch and Steve made NY Strip steak and scalloped potatoes for dinner.  It was fantastic!

After dinner we crossed the pack bridge and hiked up to the Moose Creek Ranger Station and airstrip.  What a place!   There were two huge flat grass runways.  Each 300 feet wide by ¾  to a mile long and lined by large 100-foot Ponderosa and Cedar trees.  One runway pointed down the Selway River canyon and the other Up Moose Creek canyon.  It looked like you could almost land a 737 on each.  Ramon, Peter, Dave and I ran up to the ranger station while throwing a Frisbee to take a look around wile everyone else hung out at the intersection of the runways.  The Ranger station had roughly 8 1920’s era log cabins, all in fantastic shape.  No one was home, and after peaking into the  buildings and reading plaques commemorating the fire jumpers who trained and were based there, we wandered back down the runway to our group.  Brett had brought along a plastic bat and wiffleball and we started up a game of baseball using the Frisbee and shirts as the bases.  The whole thing (scenery and the game) was surreal.  We could have all been dead and in heaven and not known it.  It was kind of like the movie Field of Dreams.   I kept passing my hand over the tall seed laden grass like the scene in The Gladiator.  Very memorable.  Crazy.

We spoke with a man from Boise in who was camping next to his two-seat Cessna airplane as we left.  It was only 1.5-hour flight from Boise.  He and his wife were camping for the weekend and were wondering where everyone else was.  We had no idea.

Rebecca rode in a duckie today.  She had a huge smile on her face the whole time.  Trey bent an oar on a rock – not usable for the rest of the trip.  I told him it was really hard to bend and oar like that (which I should not have done).  He said “really,” and then acted a little less enthusiastic.

We set up another campfire in the fire pail and talked until 11:00.  No swimmers today.

Day 3, June 16 – Tony Point to Upper Pinchot
We woke up with a little spring in our steps due to a fine breakfast from Eric and Dusty.  As we were packing the boats I felt a bit apprehensive, and worried that I was going to flip today – so I strapped everything down extra tight and tried to ignore the feeling. 

Moose Creek added significant volume to the river and it was immediately obvious that the river had become quite different when we scouted Double Drop (Class IV).   We scouted the rapid from river left and plotted out a plan past the initial large pour over and into the large hole at the bottom.  From the top, the hole looked like fun, so I suggested we hit it in it’s gut.  Gary asked me to show everyone the way, and I was happy to oblige.   We hit the initial pour in its center on the right side of the river and lined up in the rapids compression waves for the bottom hole.  I had no momentum going into Double Drop’s final hole and although I hit is straight, the front of the boat stopped, the back washed around, and we ended up sideways..  Not good.  The raft, a beautiful 15 foot, Hyside self-bailer surfed the hole sideways back down to its bottom, leading me to think that Rebecca and I were soon going to be taking a swim through the next series of Class IV rapids.  As we surfed sideways down, I yelled hyside! We both jumped on the upwards tube which immediately pulled us out of the hole.  The last time I surfed sideways in a hole was 19 years ago when I was an 18-year-old guide on the Yampa and I decided to hit the main hole in Teepee at 14,000 CFS (with an identical result).  I thought it was fun then, I didn’t think it was fun today.  We eddied out, hiked up the river, and watched everyone else come down.  I wondered what everyone was talking about when they saw us surf the hole, and it became obvious when everyone skirted the initial pour-over and then rowed like hell backwards up to and through the final hole that we had all gained a bit more respect for this river from that episode.  Even the kayakers went around the deepest part of the hole.

Our next rapid was Wa-Poots (Class IV) which the Kayakers scouted on the fly and pointed us in the right direction.  I don’t remember much about the rapid other than it was fun.  Our next rapid was the infamous Ladle (Class IV).  We jumped out of our boats and ended up scouting the thing for about 45 minutes before Brady took charge and decided to row Mark’s boat down.  The problem with Ladle is that there are about 16 ways you could get down, all with major problems.  River right was great at the top, hell at the bottom.  River center had a huge, narrow pour over at the top and big rocks lining the left side of the line.  River left was so far away that you could not see the line.  The previous year Brady took the line down the right, but in lower water there was hell to pay river right.  So we sat and talked, and talked some more until Brady took charge.  The nice thing about Brady showing us river right is that we could all see that it did not work.  He got hung up and had to be helped over some rocks to continue.  Mitch took Gary and Ramon’s boat down the middle – and made it look easy.  So I decided that that was the way to go and we took the centerline as well (harder than Mitch made it look).  Dave took the line to river left and bumped his way down with no incident.  It was not obvious that Dave had originally intended to go river left, but when you have a choice between wrapping on a rock and going river left, he made the right choice. 

We waited to the side for everyone to come down and noticed a bobbing head coming down.  I yelled, “swimmer!” and ran back to our raft to help.  Eric had dumped out of his duckie at the first rock in the rapid and swam the entire rocky and perilous line river right.  He was able to swim to the shore and grab Brett’s kayak paddle just above us.  We yelled at him to run down to us so we could retrieve his boat.   A few minutes later we were in pursuit of his boat and reached it just prior to Little Niagara, another Class IV. 

We pulled his duckie onto the bow of our boat and decided to run the rapid together.  Little did I know at the time that we had just invited “bad luck boy” onto our raft for a big class IV rapid.  He mentioned that he had swam at least 5 times earlier that day.  Had I known what was coming, I would have kicked him out with my big foot as soon as Brady gave us back his paddle.

Little Niagara is a rapid with three distinct stages – so it is difficult to scout.  The first is an easy river right drop with big waves.  The second and third have large rocks, waves, holes, and a pour over right in the main channel.  As we were winding our way down the last part of the rapid, Mitch was up on shore directing traffic.  As we were talking to each other I noticed, all too late, the large pour over and started pulling hard to no avail.  We hit the rock, I looked down at six feet of a plunge, and said, “oh no!”  I looked up to see Rebecca and Eric and the duckie tumble downstream on impact and then felt the boat rotate and dump me.  This was the first time in my life I had been dumped unwillingly out of a boat and was quite surprised by the whole thing.  As I was under water, I reached up to try to feel the boat and to my surprise I came up right next to it, popped myself in the half full of water boat and began looking for Eric and Rebecca.  I saw Eric first but went and grabbed Rebecca and pulled her in, then Eric.  We watched the duckie sit stationary in the bottom of the hole as we drifted downstream and recovered.  Rebecca had been sucked under, swallowed some water, and was gasping for air.  Not something you want to see your wife and mother of three doing in such a remote place.  Eric said, “I thought that a raft would have been safer, especially this one!”  I wish.

Mark also swam a good stretch of Little Niagara after losing his balance while standing and taking a photo.  We kicked Eric out into his duckie after Brady brought it to us.   The rest of the morning’s rapids were a bit of a blur as Rebecca and I sorted out what had happened.  Osprey was a challenge with a big river right wall compression.  Todd fell out of his duckie on Osprey and used it to shield himself from the wall.   Lunch at the meager looking Meeker Creek campground helped perk us both up and get us back into things. 

Rebecca spotted a mother bear and its cub on the north shore as we floated down river after lunch.  The bears were running fast directly uphill away from us.  When we reached camp Gary walked down to Lower Pinchot and came back saying that the upper one was better because the lower camp was too noisy from Wolf Creek Rapid.

Upper Pinchot was beautiful northern side camp overlooking the river.  Dave & Trey made great fajitas as we set up camp, Eric fly fished to take his mind off the day, and we sat in our wonderful folding chairs.  After dinner we scouted Wolf Creek Rapid, had a rock throwing contest, and watched Eric fly fish.  Peter saw fresh bear scat on the trail and decided that it was a good idea for us to stay together.   We set up another fire in the fire pan and turned in around 11:00 again.   

Swimmers today: Me, Rebecca, Eric (multiple), Mark, & Todd. 

Day 4, June 17 Upper Pinchot to Selway Falls
We started the day early by running Wolf Creek Rapid.  We eddied out in the pool just below our camp and discussed the line options that we scouted the evening before.  We seemed to all agree that the river had become so large that we did not have any other option that to go with the flow and run it down the center.  The Kayaks and duckies went first and all flipped except for one duckie.  Brady hit the main hole upside down and I swear I heard his helmet scrape a big rock (he looked no worse for the wear).  I was the guinea pig of the rafts once more and tried to row backwards river left to avoid the big holes, to no avail.  Pulling hard we hit a large 7-foot wave and the big hole dead center at the end.   After the rest of the rafts made it down the same line safely, I think we all agreed that Wolf Creek was best rapid of the trip considering its power, size, and it’s fun factor.   

Jim’s Creek rapid was the next class IV of the day and the final class IV on the trip.  It started with a large hole river right and had some nice, 8 foot compression waves.  Todd took a pretty good swim out of his duckie in this rapid and ended up choking down some water.  After Jim’s Creek I think we all took a sigh of relief and started paddling in earnest to make the take out.  On the last Class III of the trip named Renshaw Creek, we were all surprised by how hard the river was forcing the boats into a river left wall.  Eric who was captaining Mark’s boat had the same issue, but ended up hitting the wall and flipped.  
The boat got pinned to the wall for about three minutes but eventually washed itself off (thank goodness).  Dave’s boat caught both Eric, Mark, and their raft and we all pulled over to help turn it over.  Nothing was lost from the boat.  We were all slightly amused by the whole thing, but this experience just goes to reinforce how easy it is to flip a raft under  the right circumstance.

We all pulled pretty hard to the take-out and arrived there just before 2:00.  Our cars were there safely thanks to the shuttle service and we made a big team effort to load the trailer by 4:30.   We drove home via Missoula and pulled into our driveway in Salt Lake about 2:30 AM. 

We had four swimmers today, Mark, Eric, Todd and Peter.

One overriding comment at the end of the day was how fantastic this trip was.  The Selway is it’s own river, unique, challenging, and like nothing else.  Our group of experienced river runners all walked away with a great respect for the stretch of river we had competed. 

I especially appreciated the time I had with Rebecca.  There is something about traveling, going on an adventure, and spending time alone with your spouse that reenergizes your relationship.  Our time spent together on this trip was priceless.

I hope someday that I am lucky enough to be a friend of someone that draws another Selway permit.   What remarkable trip.