Rapids, Rain and Tonnes of Snow - Ghost Dam To Cochrane

This weekend marked the final opportunity for me to put in a decent distance run before the South Dakota Kayak Challenge.  With Tyler spending his birthday camping in Kananaskis, I decided to get together a small group of friends and planned to paddle the Bow River from Ghost Dam to Calgary, this would be an approximate distance of 55km.

This leg is fairly straight forward with a decent current, a low class II wave train, a small step and plenty of shallows before becoming very slow and lake-like just about the Bear's Paw dam.

Unfortunately due to threats of thundershowers and a temperature that dropped from 9C to 4C, it was decided that we were going to pull out at Cochrane, limiting our distance to a mere 19km.

As we arrived at Ghost Dam, we discovered the the Ghost Reervoir was still completely frozen, this proved pivotal in our decision to pull out at Cochrane.  As we started portaging the canoes the 800m to the put-in, we discovered that Alberta Hydro had fenced off the normal put in (a small lagoon below the dam) and forced us to portage an extra 300-400m, making the entire portage about 1.2km in distance and a elevation drop of about 80m.

Shortly after putting in we came to the most technical section of the river, a small class II rapids  Having not paddled with my partner before, I decided it would be good to pull. out and scout the rapids with them and explain how we would run them.  I also told them the story of the first time I ran this section with a new partner - a story I will share briefly here.  About a year and a half ago I was leading a group of 5 boats from Ghost Dam to Cochrane.  While in the lagoon I went over how to eddy turn properly and a few other canoeing techniques for when we come up to the rapids.  To make the story short, my bow paddler panicked when she saw the waves and decided that it would be better to jump out of the boat instead of flipping in the rapids and getting wet.  Logic that I am still not able to grasp.  Thankfully this run was less eventful and both boats ran the rapids and step without any incident or dunking.

As we pulled closer to Cochrane snow began to line the shores of the river again, this was not a surprise, but the amount of snow was.  The snow/ice on the shores was near 1.5m high still.  At the same time the thunderstorm that was coming in decided to start sprinkling, taking that into account and knowing that we had yet to paddle to Bear's Paw Reservoir above Calgary, and that the Ghost Reservoir was still frozen, we decided to pull out.

So again this year another attempt at a long run was stymied by the weather, but who can complain, it was still 20km and a few hours on the river.

Next weekend I will be in Penticton BC for the Duel In The Desert.  I'll be racing in an OC-6 on Sunday and an OC-2 on Saturday.  I'll be updating that as it comes closer and that will likely be the last real paddling I get in before the 2011 South Dakota Kayak Challenge.