Rouge River
Sunday, March 23, 2003
route:
length: 9.0km, 1 day
difficulty: novice
participants: Keith Nunn, Michael Johnson, Leslie
offsite report: http://vvcc.canoeontario.ca/gallery/rouge2
OR try the Wayback Machine
report:
Wow! What a great run today. before today, I was primarily thinking of the Rouge as a novelty run, but I'm adding this river to my regular spring list.
There was probably at least 6 more inches of water from when I ran it last year. I would say that the general difficulty level was a bit less than it was last year except for the last 2km (which is in a section I didn't do last year). However, there were many, many more playable features at this level.
There were surfable waves all over the place. Lot's of little rock eddies for practicing tight turns. Because there are so many though, you have to be careful about about guard rocks because there are quite a few. I didn't play as much as I might have with other solo boaters because the only folks I was able to connect with was my Dad and a friend of his. They were great, were paddling tandem, so didn't have many play opportunities and mostly kept going except when I stopped.
The only rapid I had to scout last year is now a regular drop. No need to have more than a look from the boat.
There are some really fantastic sections of class II and many opportunities to increase the personal challenge because of the plentiful rocks. It's generally easy to pick a straight clear channel though, so I believe that the section from Sewells down to Twynn Rivers drive would be a good teaching section for solid novices (still a bit dodgy for raw beginners though).
The last 2km were a fairly hairy mess of sweepers. Two river wide and one nearly so on a nasty bend. The other boat had a very bad time trying to escape that one.
There were many eddies, though mostly smallish. There were many good surf waves, small holes and rock eddies. I'm thinking of going again on Thursday or Friday and probably skipping the last 3km. Any takers? I'll be posting it shortly.
Photos from this trip are available at http://vvcc.canoeontario.ca/gallery/rouge2
See my report from last year at http://vvcc.ca/vvcc/logs/report.php3?trip=55 |
