Cascades will please wet rafters
“It’s going to be one of the better seasons we’ve had in probably 10 years,” said D.J. Tuttle, who operates Action Rafting in Cashmere. “I’d say the last year we had like this was ‘99, with this kind of snowpack and late runoff.”
The Wenatchee River is Washington’s top rafting destination because of its central location, its big-water thrills and the fact that it can handle the traffic. As many as 100 rafts might run the Wenatchee on a busy Saturday in June.
“The Wenatchee’s going to be awesome,” said Brad Coleman, whose Seattle-based Blue Sky Outfitters provided raft trips for about 10,000 customers last year on the Wenatchee, Methow, White Salmon, Tieton and Skagit rivers.
“We have so much snowpack up there and it’s such a late spring, the behavior we’re seeing with the rivers right now is what we’re used to seeing a month ago.”
And that, for rafters, means big business. A lot of customers hesitate to shell out $75 or more on an April raft trip out of fear of frigid water – but doing the same thing in May, June or July simply sounds like a kinder, warmer experience.
“I’d much rather have good water in July than in April,” Tuttle said.
The White Salmon River is raftable nearly all year long because of steady flows from Mount Adams’ White Salmon Glacier. The river runs through a particularly scenic channel, the narrowness of which means rafters can achieve the same kind of whitewater thrills at a much lower rate of cubic feet per second (cfs) as many of the bigger rivers.
All Adventures Rafting, whose headquarters overlooks the river at BZ Corner, north of the town of White Salmon, has been running trips on the White Salmon since January. Until the beginning of May, All Adventures was still able to take passengers over Husum Falls – which, with a 14-foot drop, is believed to be the country’s largest waterfall commercially run in paddle rafts.
However, with runoff kicking into high gear, All Adventures is backing off doing the falls – possibly until mid-July.
The underrated Methow River is an excellent whitewater run when the flows are up, said Jerry Michalec, owner and head guide for Arlington-based North Cascades River Expeditions. “It’s got the best stuff. It’s just a very entertaining river – it’s got something like 17 miles, and every one of them is very entertaining, and yet it’s relatively safe.”
With the big snowpack, though, all would-be rafters should be wary of trips following a stretch of particularly hot days, which can create bigger rapids, dangerous hydraulics and a surge of downed trees and other debris.
“It’s going to be a good year, but I think we’ll probably be facing a couple of hot weekends where I don’t know if we’ll be wanting to run or not,” Michalec said.
On the plus side, there’s enough snow in the mountains, and enough rivers fed by enough different basins and stream systems, for a long season. By trying different rivers at different times, a diehard whitewater lover could conceivably start now and raft every other weekend without ever having to raft the same river twice.