Death March along Rancheria Creek, Or, Wet Feet are Safe Feet

July 12, 2017
Seavey Pass to across Wide Creek
Pacific Crest Trail Thru-Hike: Day 69

Morning

I’m nervous as shit, and I feel like the never-ending bombardment of life hazards (treacherous creeks) is wearing me down. It never ends! I’m trying to listen to music to calm my nerves, but all I feel right now, even surrounded by all this beauty in the early dawn of our amazing campsite before Seavey Pass, is that I’m sick of it.

We’ll see how today goes. Beta (Daniel Winsor) says:

“Creeks aren’t dangerous. Our decisions are dangerous.”

Evening

Today we summited Seavey Pass and made our way down the treacherous, extremely steep, snow-covered slopes toward Kerrick/Rancheria “creek”.

It was a fucking monster. A raging, full-blown river. And everyone we ran into was like ‘no problem! There’s a log!’

As you know, I think logs are a TERRIBLE idea pretty much 100% of the time, but the creek was SO deep and SO fast that I had resigned our only option to being the log. 

We began the 3-mile death march. Walking on a near-vertical snow slope that plunged several hundred feet into the river. Keeping my eye on the creek the whole time. Scoping. Looking for something very specific below. 

Just a few tenths of a mile into our march, I looked down at the creek and saw what I was looking for: completely laminar flow. As far as the eye could see. If  it was laminar, we could swim. We could swim and predict how far downstream we’d get swept. We could aim with a diagonal trajectory. Better yet, there was an island in the middle so we could break the crossing into two portions if the current was too strong. We carefully descended the slope to the water and decided to go for it. I couldn’t, wouldn’t cross on a log. This section of the creek was a gift. We’d swim it.

It was a chest-deep swim but the flow was predictable. We moon-manned, bouncing up and down as our feet touched the bottom and we pushed off, each time moving a little closer to the opposite side. A smooth crossing. The opposite bank was south-facing and had no snow at all, so we bushwhacked for the next 3 miles to the official PCT crossing and went on our way. 

We had a few more crossings: Stubblefield Canyon braided beautifully into 5 sections just upstream of the PCT crossing. Two were very shallow, one was shin-deep at a point and strong whitewater but the crossing of that finger was quite short and very manageable. The 4th and 5th fingers were slow and deep. Waist deep, around 2pm.

The creek in Tyndall canyon was a standard slow, knee deep crossing at 4:30pm.

The grand finale was Wide Creek at 6:30pm. We crossed just below a rapids/waterfall, just above/upstream of the PCT crossing. The creek didn’t braid, but we were able to turn a nearly 100 foot wide, chest deep crossing/swim into an island hop, with fewer chest-deeps sections between the sand bars. We crossed three fingers of the braid. What if you lost footing? Well, you were already swimming as it was too deep to moon man, so there wasn’t a whole lot of footing to lose.

The funny thing is, we crossed Wide when the water was at its highest for the day (late evening), in a creek that was SO DEEP and SO WIDE. Everyone we saw after we swam Kerrick though we were nuts for not taking the log, but swimming Kerrick was the perfect training for a creek that was even wider and deeper. We were ready for it because we knew we could handle it. I’m really proud of us.