From my Doorstep to Onion River Whitewater

My path was a narrow, windy one, closed in by thick stands of spruce and balsam fir.

On my right, 35 pounds of whitewater kayak hung off my shoulder blade, padded by a life jacket but an uncomfortable and awkward burden nonetheless.

To my right, the canyon dropped away, hiding the Onion River, which roared in the depths unseen. It was what I had come for. At least that’s what I told myself.

It would be good to know what I wanted, because, man, I had been carrying the kayak for a while now. Before that, I’d paddled it about five miles down Lake Superior, making slow progress in the short-hulled craft.  It had been built for maneuvering in tight places, holding an edge going into rapids. Long  distances over open water? Not so much.

The  idea for this adventure had been kicking around in my head long before I set out of course. The summer before, I’d glanced at the 12-foot drop into the plunge pool, and thought it looked scary, but doable. Since that time. I’d climbed up the Onion River Falls, gone skinny dipping there, ice climbed the falls in winter (http://tomsonthemove.com/two-ice-axes-one-bike-no-car-good-times/), and even cross-country skied down the canyon, taking skis off for the sketchier drops.

But I hadn’t kayaked anything yet. Thus, I had obvious motivation to take on the next adventure. Better yet, I wanted to make it a doorstep adventure, meaning that I would eschew motorized transport between home and the adventure destination.

Why throw in the extra miles of kayaking, very slow kayak miles at that, when I could  just drive to the parking lot at the base of the river and haul my kayak up?

It would have been too simple that way. I also don’t accept driving and flying as a matter of course when it comes to an adventurous lifestyle. Burning fossil fuel can be a necessary evil sometimes, or maybe just an evil which I can rationalize away in the face of an epic opportunity for adventure. However, when there comes an opportunity to go on an adventure without putting more pollution into our atmosphere, or enriching abusive oil corporations, I’m all for it.

We can lower our demands if we are not in such a hurry to get places. The road can be as exciting as the destination if we keep our eyes open for wonder just as there are all kinds of things that we miss driving by at high speed.

The sea caves on Lake Superior for instance.

After I biked down to the launch beach, I only needed to paddle a couple miles to come across some of these phenomenal openings in the basalt cliffs along the shore. These are probably only a quarter mile from Highway 61 as the crow flies, but they were a world away from all that when I bobbed the nose of the kayak beneath the overhanging ledges, listened to the slap of water echoing off the walls.

Some of the things I enjoy about these caves include that I can paddle backwards into one of them and let the walls create a frame for the Superior landscape. Miles of forests and cliffs stretch out along the shore until they recede at the horizon. The horizon often changes with distant fog banks and false islands. Much closer, I can admire the shimmery amygdaloids within the stones. These jewel-like nuggets are scattered throughout the igneous stone along Superior, a legacy of the ancient lava flow.

The caves hold wonders to match some of the most storied wonders of the North Shore, though I doubt even one-percent of the people who go on their long journeys to and from these places have any idea of how close they are to such an amazing destination.

It’s harder to write a rave review about the squadrons of pissed-off gulls living near the caves.

They dropped out of the air when I got near and went directly at my head. I flailed my paddle at them to fend them off. The gulls have chicks now, that look like dirty wads of cheeping drier lint. The parents are protective ones, and my kayak passing by provoked a keen sense of of stranger danger.

I had also been a target of aerial bombardment a week earlier when one attacker dropped a nasty payload that splattered against my sprayskirt. I should write a product endorsement: “It kept seagull crap off my legs!”

The worst part was I would have to go through the gauntlet again on the return trip. At that time, the wind picked up further out in the lake, presenting me with a dilemma, not unlike that of Scylla and Charybdis out of Homer’s Odyssey. I could avoid the wind and waves by staying closer to the rock walls but it would mean that I would once again become a ripe target for the squawking, aggressive birds.

I ran my boat aground near the mouth of the Onion River — about a mile from the caves. I took the time to eat some lunch and left some of the gear I wouldn’t need behind to pick up later.

I traded my floppy sea kayaking hat for an orange whitewater helmet, hauled the boat up to Highway 61 and looked both ways before I crossed. There was a lot of traffic, trailers and what have you bombing down the road in search of whatever kicks they had waiting for them.  My destination was only about a mile walk, though it would be start as  a steep climb.

The trail went passed the lower falls. People have run these fearsome drops in kayaks, one of which a writer on American Whitewater has identified as “Tears for Fears,” but that is above my skill caliber and risk tolerance right now.

Whether the upper canyon was within these categories remained to be seen.

I put my kayak down several times during the walk, trying to peer down into the canyon and get a sense of what I was up against. Mostly I looked for fallen trees. The narrowness of the canyon and the thick vegetation made it difficult to see anything, and sometimes scouting meant walking out on crumbly slopes above the abyss, reaching for support on dead trees with shallow roots.

The part of the canyon that really worried me were the narrows, where the canyon simultaneously squeezed and dropped, where the water roared through like exhaust through a rocket nozzle, dropping anywhere from 10 to 15 feet on a more that 45 degree angle. The water would slam into a wall. It seemed likely that I would too if I tried to go down the same way.

These sections came after the aforementioned 12-foot waterfall. That distance was intimidating to me, but I also remembered an experience from my time in Galway, Ireland six years ago when the kayak club guys pushed me over a bridge that was at least that high. Aside from a loose spray skirt and a boat full of water, the landing had gone just fine.

This particular drop was in an isolated pool, so if I ended up flipping out of my boat, I would be able to get to shore well before any downstream rapids.

The put in was worrisome, because I had to safely lower myself and my boat down a steep crumbling bank. I lowered myself on wet rock and loose dirt, then reached up as high as I could to grab the front of the boat. I could barely grasp it without toppling over backward into the river. I inched it forward gradually, taking care not to give it too much momentum and take both of us for a wild ride.

When I finally got the boat lowered, I placed it in a small eddy out of the main current. This was where I got in. I started in on attaching my spray skirt to the cockpit, though this was slow work considering that every  couple of seconds I had to bat the water with my paddle in order to stay out of the  current.

I had already rehearsed the moves, now it was time to see the execution. I paddled out against the flow, letting it whip my boat around as I braced with the paddle. There  was the problem of the tree across the river, but I ducked under pretty much where I had planned to.

Whoops! Hitting that submerged rock hadn’t been part of the plan. I recovered and sank a couple solid strokes into the river before it dropped from under me.

The instant of pleasant weightlessness gave way to the gentle deceleration of the boat sinking into aerated water. The foam came up chest high and then I was out.  A war whoop escaped my lips.

The next sections of river were far less dramatic. The low water meant that I was scraping rocks. At times, I used my hands as much as I used the paddle in order to crawl my way along the river bottom,  refusing to admit that it just might have been easier to get out of the boat in places.

The rapids in the narrows could have been hellishly, difficult in high water, but in these conditions, they were more like sledding down steep, wet rocks. The water would  pile up on one side of my boat and create a cushion between the wall and me, helping me steer away  from the wall before I hit it. Still, I ended up pushing off one wall with my hand.

The excitement of the day was definitely the fast kayaking moves needed to get through the drops.

I loved that feeling when the current brought me toward the wall and I felt my body move with its own will to make the right moves (oh so much can depend on those right moves) and I thought, “I’ve got this.”

Two Ice Axes, One Bike, No Car, Good Times

_MG_4697
The view, halfway up the Onion River falls

It’s only a couple miles from my apartment to the Onion River, so I prefer not to drive there if I can help it.

I prefer not to drive if there is an inch of snow on the bike path, and I’m going to be pedaling through that snow carrying crampons and ice axes in my backpack. It’s all for the greater glory of the adventure, the doorstep adventure.

Doorstep adventure? That’s the term I’ve started using to describe any adventure that starts under my own power from the minute I leave the door. If I run from my apartment to the top of nearby Carlton Peak, that’s a doorstep adventure, but if I were to drive a couple miles up the road to the trailhead, than it’s not. The part where I was in my car wasn’t part of the adventure. That was driving.

Lately, I’ve been trying to make as many of my adventures into doorstep adventures as I can, whether it means running somewhere from my door, biking from my door or — eventually — skiing from my door.

It would be really cool if this blog were some influential publication that everybody read, because I think it would be neat to make the doorstep adventure into the hot new trend. It has that extra challenge of requiring people to cover more territory under their own power. Plus, it forces people to put more value on what is near to them, rather than coveting some far away place that they will need to burn many gallons of fuel to get to.

_MG_4762
Little holes in this rock along the Onion River  were caused by hot gasses in the lava before it cooled

By cutting cars, planes, aircraft carriers, whatever out of the adventure equation, the doorstep adventure keeps pollution out of the atmosphere. This, many would argue, should be kind of a goal for those who take the time to appreciate the natural beauty that pollution threatens.

For this particular adventure, I sought to fill a couple of hours traveling to the river, climbing up its frozen waterfalls, taking in some scenery and biking back from whence I came. Hardly a major expedition, it was far less of a commitment than some of the doorstep adventures of my past such as when I biked from the doorstep of the raft company where I’d worked in Utah and went out to Washington and Oregon; or more recently, when I left town with my girlfriend in October to spend five days on the Superior Hiking Trail. Kids’ stuff compared to the badassery of Göran Kropp who biked from home in Sweden to Mt. Everest, climbed it, and pedaled back.

Perhaps the greatest peril that I would face would be the ice patches along the bike path. Often people’s footprints or a tire tread coming out of a driveway would leave icy zones where I didn’t dare turn the handle bars or hit the brakes. Arguably, the breakdown lane on nearby Highway 61 would have been a safer travel option, but I was in no mood for huffing exhaust from semis or from all the non-doorstep adventurers traveling up the North Shore.

Progress was slow, but I made it to the trailhead without wiping out.

_MG_4708
Reverse icicles as seen underneath a ledge along the falls

The Onion River carves a canyon a couple hundred feet deep through layers of dark gray basalt and pinkish rhyolite. Both types of stone are remnants of the billion-year-old lava flow that formed the basin where Lake Superior sits today.

The main trail went up and to the east ridge of this cut in the rock; my path was along the riverbed below.

Here I could look up at the gnarled cedars whose roots extracted their meager sustenance through cracks in the canyon walls, cedars that had grasped the walls in unreasonable over-leaning perches for centuries.

In places, the rock looked almost spongy, beset with tiny bubbles that had once been hot gasses fizzing out of the lava. When quartz or calcite sediment infiltrated these chambers, they left little stones within the stone: amygdaloids they call them. There were places where I could see constellations of these tiny gems embedded within the duller rock above my head.

The river itself was a scarce trickle beneath slabs of ice. There was the occasional place where the ice cracked and exposed a small piece of the rushing water beneath. Here, I would find animal tracks.

As I got further from the highway, I began to hear the murmurings of the hidden river. In places it thrummed like a drum, elsewhere, a quiet gurgle.

_MG_4741
Icicles beneath a small overhanging ledge

 

I threw my pack off at the base of the frozen falls and dug out my gear. I made sure to sit on the pack, not the snow while attaching crampons to my feet.

It wasn’t a particularly steep climb, but going up the slick ice would have been next to impossible without the crampons and ice axes. I was wary of a couple places where I could see the water flowing beneath the curtain of ice. It would certainly suck to break through and get sprayed with cold water, or lose my grip and fall over backwards. Fortunately, there were other places where the ice was solid and the climbing was easy.

At the top of the first cascade was a plunge pool where the ice was a cracked, mushy yellow. Steep cliffs climbed up on both sides. I knew from swimming there in the summer that the water beneath that ice was well over my head, and was in no mood to go through with a backpack on my shoulders and a camera around my neck.

Either I would have to take my crampons off and Gollum-crawl along the steep ledge to get to the next falls, or I could trust the ice on the far left side, which was tilted slightly and looked sturdiest. I chose the later option, banging away at the ice in front of me with an axe before I trusted it with my weight.

The second set of falls was steeper and higher than the first. From the left side of the plunge pool, I had a somewhat awkward ascent between the weak ice where the water was flowing and an overhanging ledge — not a lot of elbowroom.

Stalagmites of clear ice lay beneath the ledge, including some that were wicked sharp at the point. Like some inlayed dagger, they shone with beauty and malice both.

I swung the axes into some solid holds and kicked my way up to the top of the ice, turned around to see the blue of Lake Superior shimmering above the birches.

_MG_4746
Cedar trees along the canyon edge

That might have been a satisfying enough conclusion to the doorstep adventure. A spur-trail went back up to the main path and to where I’d left my bike. But I was curious about exploring further up the canyon.

While I had hiked along the top of the upper section here, I hadn’t gotten down to where the river moved between the narrow walls. Now the frozen water offered an easy way in.

Some things are worth waiting for. The canyon here had all the feeling of a sanctuary, the air still and soundless between the walls. The droning highway noise in the background as I climbed the icefalls was gone. One could well pretend that humanity itself had vanished in such a place. The only voice was the occasional gurgle that issued from some kettle beneath the ice.

A three-foot mound of frozen foam stood at the base of one falls. I nudged it with my axe and the blade moved through it as if through icy feathers.

Here and there, I saw overhangs, places where the canyon could offer shelter in poor weather (though the broken rocks at the bottom of these overhangs would make me think twice.)

_MG_4744
Cedar needles dropped on the rock make for excellent moss-growing conditions

In another spot, a shallow cave lay a few feet above the riverbed. No doubt an earlier course of the river had carved that cave, its momentum coming down from the hills had brought it crashing down against the bedrock. I crunched up a small tongue of ice to crawl inside. I turned around to survey the scene from the cave mouth: tall, proud bulwarks of stone, the majesty of cedar and white pine growing out from the cliffs.

It was probably only a mile to the highway as the crow flies. Thousands of noisy, polluting cars went by here each day transferring people to the places they had to go, the places they thought they wanted to go.

Here in the canyon, I’d left the only set of human tracks.

_MG_4755
A monument of frozen foam stands in the center of a plunge pool