SAKS: NF Willow Creek 2019 (long edit)

River: North Fork Willow Creek
Flow: 106 cfs
Paddlers: Gavin Rieser, Kyle Hall
Safety: Jon Braun
Date: 4/27/19
Kyle and I went exploring around the NF Willow Creek area. It was a fairly cold weekend with a little rain and snow, but mostly no precipitation during our hiking and kayaking. The first day we explored some stouts on Sand Creek, which looks very runnable but very 5+ to 5++.
The second day we did some further explorations with Jon in the upper drainages of NF Willow Creek, then paddled the creek itself. We had a perfect flow (though there were some upper boulder gardens that were still a little manky). I ended up running the Devil's Slide from top to bottom, which may be a first. At the bottom, I was so stoked on a successful run (despite having an altered line in the middle) that I forgot about the huge eddy to my right and went straight for the left move. I ended up getting sucked into the undercut. It felt like there was a sieve under there so I pulled and swam pretty quick. Turns out it was just water sucking into the slide. Oops!
Lesson for next time: I was stuck in the eddy, going in circles for about 15 minutes while safety got set up for a proper boat extraction. In hindsight, I could have used my waist throwbag to clip my boat, then swim out of the eddy myself on river right (I couldn't do it with the boat and got rejected every time). Once out of the eddy, I would have been able to pull my boat out and self-rescue with my spare paddle. This would have drastically sped up the recovery and would have expedited the trip. As it was, we wasted too much time getting me and my boat to river left so we had to hike the rest of the run.
Looking forward to going back next time and running Angel's Slide and the drops below that!

[@bryceyaple96]

Bro devil's slide had me puckered just watching...

[@Steve-0-]

Whoa dude!!!!

[@thatsounditmakes9177]

Holy shit that was scary!

[@paddler511]

Dude that slide at the end was gnar bar! Glad you were OK when you hit that undercut at the bottom!

[@RoccoRusso530]

sick!!! scary ending, stoked you're ok!!

[@tobindubois]

what boat a prijon ___?