Upper Upper East Fork Kaweah

[Nathan H]

Myself, Macy Burnham and Chris Tulley took off of the Upper East Fork Kaweah today. We are pretty sure it's a first descent but perhaps someone knows otherwise? We put-in at the Atwell-Hockett trail and descended about 2.2 miles (1000 vertical feet) of the canyon. We planned to do a two day trip 7.5 miles all the way down to the Lookout point trail (2600 feet total), but were slowed by the incredibly steep and gorged-out nature of the canyon. We completed almost all of our river mileage on the first day and hiked out early on day two. We had only planned for two days but knew that we'd be in there for three to four days if the pace held up. It also didn't help that I had a seven inch crack in the hull of my boat. And it was better to hike out at high elevation where the manzanita wasn't so thick....well that didn't turn out to be the case during our 7 hour, 1200 vertical feet, 0.5 mile hike up the canyon wall.

As for the run, it's the shit. The first half mile is mostly boulder gardens sitting on a bedrock base and then the run quickly becomes 100% bedrock gorges. This run is also a lot of work. Each gorge requires above river scouting of its entire length given the walled in nature and the fact that river level scouting was not possible in many places. The drops in there are big, really big, and they're stacked up. We portaged one cascade that we couldn't scout from above or see until we had hiked around and put-in below....a 20 footer into a 25 footer with a bowled out room at the bottom. Totally runnable a la upper cherry. We'll let the big boys run that one. Another massive slide dropping about 50 feet ended with a bedrock corkscrew...you'll either do a compete rotation or land on your face. This run was like South Silver on Crack, but crazy deep in a gorge, with must run drops, and much more water. In fact we had a bit too much water. 800-900 at three rivers would probably be optimal.

We camped literally underneath a fallen Giant Sequioa that had burnt recently and bridged the river bed. We had no flat spaces to lay, but the bark pieces from the Sequioa were extremely sturdy and formed nice 5x10 foot flat strips when balanced between two rocks.

The gorge we saw right before we hiked out had several drops we could see but kept going and going around the corner beyond where we could walk even relatively high above river level. It was all runnable...20 footer into a 30 footer followed by a 10 footer with a stout hole...etc.

This run needs to see some more exploration. What we saw led me to believe this is the next big thing. It's basically a cross between Upper Cherry and Royal Gorge. Who knows what lay around the next bend...the next two miles past where we stopped drop 850 feet. Bring a rope.

I think it'll be in next weekend...