Brad Meiklejohn, Paul Schauer and I flew in from Talkeetna to an unnamed lake about 7 miles from boatable water on June 19. It took us three hours to walk to the put-in and another 4 hours to get to the Fairview in Talkeetna. In between the 11 miles of Disappointment took 8 hours of our full attention.
The Talkeetna was running at 6000 cfs and we had all day rain on a pretty low flow run of the Creek.
The creek is about 11 miles of paddling, with a gradient up to 300 feet/mile. We portaged 7 drops, including the two of “Sprained Ankle” and a handful of others without names and some newly formed by fresh landslides. The most impressive feat of the day was Paul cleanly dropping the 15 foot high “Three Blind Mice” and bumping my recirculating raft out of the hole at the base.
Brad and I are in agreement that this is probably the most “out there” packrafting we have done: remote, long, difficult but not particularly dangerous, and steep, with sharp rocks. But five years ago Six Mile, Little Su, and Ship Creek were all out there, too. Now they get regularly run.
Having a class V boater along in Paul Schauer was a plus.
There’s a post on the trip http://packrafting.blogspot.com/2010/06/paul-schauer-butt-boating-hero.html and a video:
All three Llamas had thigh straps.
