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Whitewater timing varies with scouting, portages, and group pace. Use as a planning baseline.
Description
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Update:
The river flooded from a major localized storm in fall of 2021 and much of the technical upper sections have changed course. Flooding put large amounts of wood in the river, eroded banks, and susbtantially changed the character of the paddling. The changes pimarily are constrained to the area below the waterfall where the river bed breaks out of bedrock into glacial sediments, and extends to near where the gradient mellows and enters the first bedrock canyon s-turns. These factors led to the packrafter fatality in August of '21. Some but not all of the wood has been cut by jetboaters, several of the channels are completely jammed off and may require a portage. The Herbert gauge can be an indicator of the Eagle's stage, but is still a different watershed and not always correlated. NWS suspects ~7' in the Eagle drainage from rain on the northern portions of the icefield whereas the herber showed a much more modest rise in stage. Scout carefully and be conservative.
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General description:
Put in at the cabin on the lake. It's a short paddle to the outflow and a wave train leads to the horizon line and the falls. The falls are 20' and options to scout or portage right or left. Alternatively you can put in below the falls, just take the game trail from the last footbridge before the cabin- easy to spot on a topo. Swift water, more wave trains and two more gradient drops on your way to the flat water. In all about a mile+ of rollicking class II,III action. This water is cold.
Access with a 5 mile portage up the Eagle River Trail, or by jet boat up the river. Cabin has propane heat and is open from 10am to 5pm so you can warm up before you start down river. Don't run the falls without careful scouting- they are technical with a a recirculating eddy, can have a large hydraulic at higher stages and are very toothy at lower stages.
Best surfing is at the wave train before the falls. Do you feel lucky? Plenty of time for a roll and to get into that eddy at the lip on river left. Best portage for the falls here.