In May of 2005 my wife Amy and I took advantage of spring melt off and headed to Southern Utah. We started with a mountain biking, canyoneering, packrafting loop on the Dirty Devil River. Afterwords we spent a day floating the Muddy Creek Chute. The Chute might be one of the all time best class II runs around.
If you are heading to some of the seasonal floats in Southern Utah keep a close eye on the stream gages. Many of southern Utah’s rivers are only runnabble for a couple weeks a year. However there are limitless possibilities on the Colorado River for combining canyoneering and packrafting that can be run year round. Keep posted for a trip we are planning this October.
water so muddy, hard to tell that it is such low flows, except that it only comes up to your ankles in some of the photos. Do you remember what the Dirty Devil gauge was reading when you went? If you don’t know the level, can you give me the dates that you did your trip (then I can look up the flows)? This info would be very helpful for me!
I just ran the Dirty Devil from Poison Springs Wash to Hite. It was only running 45-55 cfs and that was a perfectly fine level for a packraft. I only had to get out a couple of times to get into a deeper channel. That run only took 2 days, quicker than I expected given the flow. Very lovely. Wished I had put in at Hanksville and done the whole thing. The Poison Springs road was quite hairy and I had to hike the last 10 miles in.
I’ll be running the Dirty Devil the last week of May with a few other friends. Our crafts vary from my packraft to 10’ SOTAR raft, two man ocean kayak and a Perception creeking kayak. I’m most concerned about my buddy who will be using a 2 man oceak kayak, I feel like he will be in and out and dragging it a bunch.
Due to time limits we are planning on running from Hanksville to Poison Springs Road and take out there. OR!! do you recomend Poison Springs to Hite?