North Fork Payette, 2000 cfs, Pyranha Scorch X--Brooks Foster kayaking

July 1 to 4, 2023. With Harrison Rea and Eric Mount.

I publish this video with a mix of joy and frustration. Joy that such a place as this exists that can be experienced in this way from the seat of a small plastic boat. Frustration that for years I was able to confidently lead the full 15 mile run top to bottom in a half slice. But I stopped going back year after year, my mental map faded, and my body grew weaker. In 2019 I made two trips to the North Fork and got back some of that mojo, completing a clean run from the topmost putin (above Steepness) to Jake's. Not sure I'll ever run Jake's again, but I'd like to be able to at least clean a top 10 with a portage at Jake's before I hang up my helmet. It'll take some more work to do that, but I'm game.

This was a trip where everything did not click the way I would like, but I still had a great time. In retrospect, I should have brought my large Scorch, which is wider, more stable, and most importantly, I had the outfitting and feel of the boat more dialed from frequent use than with the X, which I had only recently acquired. The idea of charging the North Fork in my new Scorch X after a couple warmup laps on the Green Truss was too alluring to pass up when I was planning my trip, but this run felt significantly more challenging than the Truss at 3.0'. Although the speed of the X was nice for certain cross-current moves--like the right/left/right at Juicer and the eddy catch at Hounds Tooth--I concluded a slower, wider boat would have been better because, most of the time on the North Fork, you want to go at the speed of the river, the wave lengths between the waves are pretty short, a paddler benefits from having more time to read the lines in the long, busy rapids, and a wider boat is more stable when smashing through breakers and offset waves and holes.

Yet a poor craftsman blames his tools. I made adjustments throughout the four day trip and felt pretty solid by the end of it, but never strong enough to run the middle five miles from Slide to Hounds Tooth. I'll save those for a return trip in the future. After four days of North Forkin' plus play sessions at Kelly's after two of them, my body was spent and I needed to recover.

During our four days in Banks, we ran four laps on the Bottom Five, two "Gentlemen's" laps from the bottom of Nutcracker through S Turn, and had two evening play sessions at Kelly's. After our first Gentlemen's, I took at at the bottom of Slide, and Harrison continued down to Jake's by himself, scouting each rapid from the shore because he was not familiar with the lines. This is something I have never heard of anyone doing before. Much respect to Harrison for succeeding in this unusual undertaking and being brave enough to run most of the Middle Five solo. The dude was rock solid out there and a great river and traveling companion.

After Eric Mount joined us on day three he led Harrison down the Middle Five two times. Eric was a guide at Cascade a few years ago and had many North Fork runs under his belt so he knew the lines and said they all came back to him after the first time down. Eric is a strong paddler and great playboater as well, as you can see in the Kelly's video I posted earlier this summer. Thanks for joining us and for your great leadership, Eric.

I'm not going to give away all of my campsite secrets because my favorite site is getting pretty crowded, but we spent one night at Kelly's, which I have never done before. It is a nice place to sleep in a van, but there are signs saying "no tent camping" and there were quite a few mosquitos there, moreso than at other sites I have stayed at lower down in the drainage.

To produce this video, I combined clips from each of my runs over four days of paddling, including several clips I took from shore of Eric leading Harrison down the middle. It was fun to play the role of photographer, but the perspective from the road never does the rapids justice. I was pleased to be there to film Eric's run at Jake's, which he completed without a roll. It's a step up from the rest of the run for sure!

In the first part of the video, the clips are in river order from the bottom of Nutcracker to Banks, and I included lots of un-named boogie rapids for the sake of completeness. After the "Thanks for Watching" screen about 19 minutes into the video, I included many other clips from the trip. It's fun to compare lines from different days on the same rapid. There's always more to learn about this challenging river.

In conclusion, I hope you enjoy the video and that you will make it your personal paddlequest to pursue perfection on the North Fork Payette, as so many have done before us. Cheers, and happy paddling!