Little River in the Smokies – Pat Glazier
| River: | Other |
| Skill: | All |
| Trip Date: | 06/25/2004 |
I awoke to the Weather Channel showing a large green blob over the entire eastern Tennessee area. This alone was enough to get my adrenaline up, but I also saw that the Little River in the Smokies was at 350 cfs and rising fast!
I immediately started calling people who knew that when the creeks rise you go paddling, not to work. By 8:00 AM. I had a group: Dave Fox In his Micro 230, Chip Turpin in his still somewhat new Esquif Zoom and me in my Esquif Nitro.
We made it to the put-in by 11:00, but Dave decided that the river, now at about 1000 C.F.S., was still a little low. So he locked his keys in his truck. This puzzle took an hour to solve but we got it with the help of a kind tourist, who for the privilege of watching two open boaters run the Sinks, loaned us his slim Jim. After setting shuttle and waiting for the required 100 spectators the river was now at 1500.
Chip and I ran the first 3 drops of the Sinks clean and set up for the last and largest one. Being Chips first time on this run, I went first to show him the open boat line on the left. It’s a good thing you can’t see the bottom from the top because I had too much angle and got trashed. Chip followed and had a good line. After waiting for Dave, who was our safety man, to get in his boat we continued down the river. Chip, who was still pumped from his Sinks run, took an early spill but was soon back in good form.
Never having run the river this high, we stopped and scouted all the large drops. All I can say is the Little is a completely different river at higher flows. It was getting pushier by the minute so we quit playing and got conservative with our lines. I got flipped above one of the larger drops and missed my first roll attempt and decided to swim rather than risk flushing over the drop upside down. I managed to self rescue above the drop so all was good.
The rest of the run was good class 3-4 fun until the Elbow. We got out to scout and didn’t like what we saw. The easy class 3 entrance rapid was now a pushy class 4 with one ledge that had a large hole on river right with wood sticking up out of it. The left line took you within a foot of an undercut rock on the cliff face. We could see a huge upwelling in what should have been an eddy behind the rock. The Elbow itself looked easier at 2000 C.F.S. But not liking the hazard on the entrance, we all decided to walk.