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I think its down from does not suck levels, and back to sucking again levels. You guys got on it at the perfect time. Day time flows are back down to 120, and its colder and cloudy today, likely to go down again tomorrow.
Even though it sucks for flows that it peaks at night, you can do a gauge check before hitting the hay to see what its likely to do in the am.
The good news is that the snowpack for the lower reaches of the ark is big and I think grape will run again for those looking for an elusive run. Just need some sun and warm.
I had a geat day in grape and agree with everything count said in the TR. From looking at the flow graph and visuals throughout the week grape was runnable at or above the level we had yesterday for about 5 days but looks to be dropping now. The gauge theat measures the flow is at the top of the res about 30 miles from the put in so there might be some lag in time for the peak I would look at the canon city gauge to judge when its peaking. There is still alot of snow in the wets and this flow was the low level melt ( i think). I would expect it to come up again as the weather warms again and melts some stufff higher up but it usually flows in 3 to 5 day spurts when it goes. And for the record Grape @ 200 CFS and up will be a good day.
So, this is nothing special, I pretty much just slapped into the right format and put it up, but here is the video as promised. Quality pretty much went to hell when I put it on youtube but it should give you an idea of the nature of the run.
Grape ran till June last year, and the Sangres have a much better snowpack this year. I even filmed two of my raft guide friends R-2 a scout thru it. It wasn't pretty, one paddle left, and a popped raft. Sadly the camera was stolen later.
that stuff looked manky, maybe with twice the flows it would pad out? or maybe I should just use a club boat. way to get it done, its about time we started boating around here.
-Tom
It wasn't really that manky. Other than the first two drops in the Tights, it was pretty padded.
In the Tights:
We had 250 and it was awesome.
350 would be primo.
It would probably start to get scary in the Tights above 400. There were very few eddies as it was. 350 looked to be about bankfull (it had been peaking around 350-400 the nights before and we could see where the water had been knocking down bushes above bank-level.). This could really make eddies an issue.
200 would be miserable.
COUNT
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"The world would be a better place if everyone kayaked."-Brad Ludden (Valhalla)
"You only get one chance to run a drop blind."-DD
Count, I think you might have had some folks believing you before they saw the video.
I don't know the flows for my runs but it always looked to me like there wood still be eddies up on the flood plain at higher water. The hard rapids themselves may or may not go well up above 4-500, but I don't think you'd have problems eddying out to scout.
I thought the level looked good. It's a creek, they have rock. High water in the tights would be scary, hard to recover without washing into drops and eddies would be very small. The rest of the run would be great at 1000.
I thought the level looked good. It's a creek, they have rock. High water in the tights would be scary, hard to recover without washing into drops and eddies would be very small. The rest of the run would be great at 1000.
Yeah it looked good to me too. I'll definately hit it up if it runs later.
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