Photos of flips in Dagger Falls and new Middle Fork features

I just got back from the Middle Fork of the Salmon by way of the Lochsa. I'll do a real trip report as soon as I can because there was plenty of adventure on this one. In the meantime, here are a few photos of the flips in Dagger, the torn Ocelot, the upper Middle Fork fire damage, and Lake Creek. Flow when these shots were taken was about 6.1 ft at MF Lodge.

Keep in mind that this is Dave Nissen (of Madcatr frames), one of the best cat boaters out there, and this boat is fully loaded for a 6-day MFS trip.

Dave was climbing the footbar and thought he could save it until the tubes fell back into the current which swept the back end out from under him. But he was back in the cage in about 5 seconds:

Next up, Barry Brazzell:


Notice that Barry took almost the identical line as Dave. Go figure. Next came Chuck Morgan. Chuck blew an oar up under the footbridge and was a bit distracted. He appears to have gotten spun a few degrees clockwise by the lateral as he came down the drop and that made all the difference. Amazingly close to Barry's line!

Next up, Ralph Pond in a 15ft Wave Destroyer, which lived up to it's name. As you see, Ralph was farther to the right:

This is the 18 inch hole torn in Chuck's boat just below Velvet. Chuck had a tough two days!

While the inner bladder had *only* an 18 inch tear, the outer shell sustained a 32 inch rip! That's a lot of baseball stitches:

Sadly, this is one of the 'prettier' vistas left on the upper 25 miles of the Middle Fork:

This is the hole that now exists below the Lake Creek fan, in the right (now main) channel.

This is the view looking upstream from slightly above the hole:

Here's the view downstream from above the fan. I've marked the location of the hole. We ran left side of the right channel with no problems.