Sampson Goes to British Columbia (Part 1)

In August the rivers started to drop out in Colorado and Sampson's Crew was still looking to get some quality kayaking in before fall. The idea came up to check out British Columbia, known in the kayaking world for its' top notch creeking and big wave surfing at Skookumchuck.

We decided to do something different, something fun, and maybe a little risky....We named our little adventure "Mission-Burn Huck Ze Gnar Sampson 420 BC" (we wanted it to sound hard core). All we had to do was load up 1 Hound Dog (sampson) + 3 Kayakers (Bryan, Max, and Chris) + 6 Kayaks (2 each) + all our stuff... into a 2 seater truck and drive it to BC.

We borrowed a trailer from CKS and a license plate from our friend Nadia and set out with the "Learn to Kayak" trailer to BC on a 2 week trip.

On the way we (1) learned about wiring trailer lights (2) met a nice cop in Utah (3) went to the OR trade show for 2 hours and met the "Cat Crap Girls" (4) washed the smell of dead animal off Sampie at 3 am in Oregon (5) met a dude named "Scab"...

..AND ran Idaho's NF Payette River (lower 5 section)

The North Fork of the Payette is awesome and contains 15 miles of roadside class V big water pseudo-mank (reminiscent of Pine Creek Rapid for 15 miles). We all agreed that we could spend our whole trip here and work our way up to the upper 10 miles....but that wasn't the plan. We reluctantly said goodbye to the NF and headed to Squamish BC...

We would have some photos of this but unfortunately our NF camera couldn't swim :(

AW's NF Payette Info
http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/detail/id/592/

We took the Sea to Sky Highway from Vancouver into the town of Squamish. The town's proximity to both epic mountains and coast make it one of the most naturally beautiful places I have ever visited. You will find many steep creeks intersecting the Sea to Sky as you make your way to Whistler.

We met some BC locals and paddled the Checkamus River...fun creeking with a big water feel and one HUGE hole! It was fun so we ran it 2x.

After checking out the town of Whistler BC we headed to Callaghan Creek with very little beta. We found the put-in and enjoyed the next few hours of exploring this Personal First Descent for ourselves...

The locals thought Callaghan might be too low, but they probably haven't been creeking in Colorado. Max Keller thought it was perfect (above).



The creek provided some clean and beautiful waterfalls. There was a clean 15 footer (pictured) and a really nice mandatory 25-footer (below). Callaghan also has some boulder gardens and slide rapids that boated really nice. Uncle Mengo demostrates the boof in a Pyranha Burn Mission kayak (above)


The water was a greyish-blue color and the rocks were what seemed to be a smooth basalt. This combination gave Callaghan a five star rating from Sampson's crew and we had 2 great runs down.


Bryan (above) really like this run because he got to jog 6k to run shuttle when we finished...a small price to pay for such a great run!

Meng was excited when he came to the lip of the big one...he even thought about running it drunk with 1 hand paddle but realized that he left his squirt boat at home...bummer :(

Bryan likes to use his "air time" to think about important issues like "I hope my dog isn't being eaten by a grizzly at the takeout"....

When we paddled up to the rig we found a happy Sampson ready to play a little frisbee. We tossed the disk and devised a gameplan for part 2 of our adventure...Skook!

More photos and VIDEO of Sampson's BC Adventure COMING SOON!

photos by Chris Menges, Max Keller, and Bryan Owen