Verde River Stand Up Paddleboarding - Follow the Flood - Episode 8

Here we are passing Child's Camp, ground and recreational area. But a lot of devastation along here from the flood as you can see. Whole row of trees just decimated. Really incredible what 80,000 CFS can do. Although with the power of water it's really not. It'll just break this stuff like toothpicks. Same exact current no less. You don't think about having a place that's that hardcore wilderness I guess you could say. But as soon as you get beyond Child's here and enter the Mazatals, it is as remote as it really gets. So incredibly beautiful but very remote. So we are on the wild section of the Verde River now. All right I scouted up ahead and this is Snaggletooth. The one where the 360 ordeal happened was Baby Snaggletooth. So we got a small natural spring here. It's on a map but it has no name. Obviously it's been such a wet year. I imagine that I'm going to be finding these anywhere that there's springs on maps. But it makes getting water a lot easier. So pretty cool. I'm gonna actually splash some on my face and then head over to the umbrella tree for camp. Oh yeah nice and plump. Sucked it down. So good to go. So real beautiful here. We got the sun going down. I figured I'd give some of the history on the Child's and Irving power plants. We're about two and a half miles of the Hossow Creek right now. So the hydroelectric plant that was up below the springs themselves. The Irving plant was built around 1917, 10 years prior. The power plant here up the river at Child's was created. The Child's plant is now a National Historic Landmark. But believe it or not, as random as it is, those were really the main sources of power for quite some time in the first half of the 1900s. Not only powering Prescott but actually providing a large majority of the power to Phoenix. And so we talked about how back when we were on the TAPCO plant that we passed up in Clarkdale, the TAPCO plant was the last one to be discontinued much much later. I believe it was in the 1970s as I had discussed about it. Here we are at the confluence of Fossil Creek. Let's see the clear water mixing out into the browner, birdy water. It is named Fossil Creek due to the high mineral content that creates the travertine or that fossilized looking coating that covers all the rocks when you have basically really hard water with high mineral content. It's beautiful back in there though, like blue-green water. About 115 miles in. So we're at nasty little Dogleg Rapid. There's a strainer on the right on the channel I'd need to run. So I'm going to try this rocky weird way to do this. Mostly so I don't have to portage but it's a wreck. But the great part is if I can't see it but if I get past there, maybe again I just smash down onto another pile of rocks. So I don't see where to go. I'm gonna have to take my time now to get around this because my leg's not in good shape. So this is kind of a bummer. Hit a stick. Some sort of a branch there underwater. Here we are at the confluence of the Verde and the East Verde River. East Verde River coming from the Pine-Strawberry areas. Payson. If you think kind of the Highway 87, the water that's running off to the west is joining up with Verde River right here. It's a Verde Butte you're seeing out there. And we're going to continue and try to get below chutes and ladders now. But it's definitely changed quite a bit since I was last here. Big sandbar now formed up and this thing was probably flowing just like nuts. So you notice how I eddied out? Same as kayaking. I'm not just charging the blind corner with no plan and then there's a strainer. I saw that eddy on the right for efficiency. I knew I could get in there. Take a look around this bend. It was nice wide and open. Already I see a pocket eddy on my inside right that I'll start kind of playing over to until I get eyes on the next bit. So if you're out here doing this, I understand the risks of doing it solo. It's just like climbing or anything and it's its own game. Oh boy. There might have been some I didn't see and I know you can get barrel cactus and things like that. But these are the first saguaro that I really processed consciously at least. So there you go. Transitioning into the low desert. I told you when we finished it would be like we started in winter and finish in the summer. And look at the trees compared to when we started with the snow. No leaves on the trees had that really bitter cold to it. Yes! I'm so stoked on the spot I just found. I'm in like awe. I don't know how to describe it. It's like this little perfectly fine sand nook in a little eddy. But there's no debris in here or anything. So here's our marker stick from last night. You can see it came down about two inches. I got a water update and so we're running around 600 here and about upper 400s at the Camp Verde gauge. So we'll continue on and I imagine we'll be getting into the tangle area in the upper 400s. Coming up on Redwall Rapid class 2. Oh sticky hands! We are at the warm spring that is below Redwall Rapid on the left. I'm gonna come check it out. It's not a hot spring but it is warm. It's definitely pretty warm water. I don't know maybe 80 degrees or something like that. Just guessing what it feels like. I'm just passing Canoe Mesa which I was told is named Canoe Mesa because of all of the canoes and wreckage that end up scattered about. It's a huge rock bar from when water is high and people upstream lose their boats and it all gets deposited here and the water comes down. After this we'll go into one of the longer, it may be the longest bald eagle closure or eagle closure above the dams. I think it is around Mule Den which will come up next. That you can't go from below Bartlett to Box Bar. I talked to the ranger at the Cave Creek Ranger District, the Tawna National Forest and that's not true. That is an eagle closure area so we cannot camp in there and we cannot get off of the water. But once we make it to Box Bar the ranger said we're clear of that area. So that just simply means that we need to run Bartlett to Box Bar through a closure the entire time and just knock it off the water which is what we're going to do. Really cool red rock right in front of us here. Beautiful stretch of nice gentle kind of class one that's just been consistently flowing on along through this incredible scenery. The flowers have been amazing. Out by Fossil, it was too far out to capture it with the camera I'm using but wow, just red and yellow all over the hillsides. Beautiful. Yeah, good times. Come on, come on, into the eddy, into the eddy, all right, all right, all right, jeepers. All right we're at the confluence of Red Creek just above the Red Creek Rapid which you can see there. It's a nice long class two. Here is Red Creek itself coming past my little camp area and got the shower set up so pretty stoked. Nice spot here. So I've also been rolling with this. I have to have this one band on the outside to keep my knee from going out and then another one in here. Here we are in the middle of absolutely nowhere at the Red Creek airstrip. There is a YouTube video online somewhere I saw of someone landing here and it is definitely pretty committing and scary looking. The situation is someone who's not a pilot but pretty much, you know, have the mountains right there and then you have the mountains kind of right there with this little mesa here so pretty wild. And what's interesting is in Jim's book it says, quote, the pool at Red Creek is one of the many birdie gems. Deep border with small cliffs on the right and trees and rocks on the left. It offers swimming and the chance at fish. Okay, so there's your pool. That's where my campsite is and that's what Jim was talking about. It's completely filled in so deep that the cliffs on the right, you know, you can't, the rocks on the right you can't even see. There's certainly no pool but you can tell there was a huge pool because the ground is soaking wet underneath me. So the creek is totally underneath me. It's been reduced to that trickle but it's coming out everywhere. So I'm just on top of it and I'm sleeping on it and it's just traveling underneath all of this sand and all the aeration with the river cobbles and whatnot and that's what this pile of sand is. It's Red Creek underneath my feet. So it's amazing how nature will do this and I may come back with my nephew when I'm, you know, 60 some years old and this pool will be back and you'll be swimming in it again and I've seen this happen in canyons in Utah where beautiful springs have filled in and 10 years later I go back and it's beautiful again but it's incredible how the water's just coming out everywhere. If you look along the edge here you'll see it's not just the Verde River water channeling it's just all actually coming out. I guess you could call it like a spring but yeah you can see right here if we just excavate this a bit we actually have a seep that just flows right out and it'll just keep doing that. Hopefully my bed doesn't now fall into the river this morning. So who knows maybe I'll be the one that has freed it. But yeah look at that it's actually eroding pretty quick. So one thing that'll be cool is tomorrow in the morning I'll check back on this little thing in case it's like eaten its way halfway through or done something really incredible. So this is amazing it's only been like a minute for real and look it's just eaten away at the whole hill. It's kind of bizarre I'm wondering how far it's going to go.