From High to Low

Описание: February 15, 2025
An I-30 special storm event brought heavy rain across the central and eastern regions of the state. The heavier stuff didn’t come down until after noon. We saw the Concord area getting the most consistent rain so we loaded up and headed northeast along I-30 to 67/167 and got off in Bald Knob. From there we drove toward Pleasant Plains. Every ditch and stream along the highway was flooded all the way into Concord, but everything west of there only received about half the rainfall. The headwaters of Grassy Creek start just to the east of Concord. We arrived to the creek at 3:15 and proceeded to set shuttle. We met up with some other guys who had already hiked down to look at the first drop, and informed us is was higher than anyone had ever seen it before. So we nervously put on our gear and hiked down to the creek with our kayaks over our shoulders. In the mean time, the creek continued to rise and everyone came to the conclusion the first drop was too sketchy to run at this level. We were under the impression the other guys hiked out so we hiked back to the vehicles. We came to find out they walked around the first rapid and put on below. So now it’s approaching 4:30 pm and it’s still raining. We decide to hold off on trying to run a section we had never done before at flood stage. We know it has sieves and undercuts that would be a nightmare if something happened to go wrong. We decide to come back at dawn the next morning, hoping the level would hold out. Unfortunately it had dropped to just below what we would need to run the rapids clean. So we cried a little and went to look at the level for Wolf. It was low but still runnable. So we drove to the bottom and set shuttle and had a great low water lap. Temperature never got above freezing on us but the pogies kept us nice and toasty.