I had a great time on the Middle section of the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River (Middle Middle) today.  I met Willie and Cyn at the takeout around 10AM.  After changing we headed on up to the put in.  We decided to put in at Island Drop because there's not much between the Concrete Bridge and there, and it's a great access point.

At 9:45AM the river was at 4300 cubic feet per second (CFS) on the Tanner guage.  This turns out to be a great flow for the play wave/hole at Island Drop.  I was in my creek boat though, so I didn't do much playing.  After not boating for more than 4 months, I was definitely rusty.  I'm glad the Middle Middle offers a long Class III warm up before any of the more defined rapids.

We headed down pretty quickly.  After about a half an hour, I regained most of my boating skills and was able to take some more aggressive lines down the drops.  There was some good catch-on-the-fly surfing, but I wasn't able to capitalize on it because I was using my creek boat.  I did however try out some beefy holes to see if I still had the stuff and was able to power through them all.

We decided to stop at the beach on river left above House Rocks, the most challenging rapid.  Cyn and I hiked down stream to scout the rapid and ended up scouting the entire drop, which is about a 1/4 mile long.  There's a very nice trail, but it's pretty high above the river, so it was hard to see the second half of the drop clearly.

Cyn decided to sneak it left, which turned out to be a really nice line for those not desiring the challenge of the meat of the drop at this flow.  I wanted to see what level my boating skills were at, so I took the center line.  I thought the upper half would be tough, but it was actually quite easy to line up and get around the monster holes.  However, I totally underestimated the second half of the drop.  It was definitely a lot bigger and dropped a lot more than I had thought from looking at it during the scout.  Fortunately, I was able to skirt the biggest holes and punch through everything else.  I took the middle line and worked left after the river turned to the right again.

The run out was not bony at all and the sun started to peak through the clouds, which was quite welcome.  By the time we got off the river, around 1.30PM, the river had dropped to just below 4000 CFS.  We saw Jenny, Victor, and some others at the takeout heading on up.

After a quick stop at Scott's Dairy Freeze in North Bend, I ended up heading to the new Snoqualmie Casino for a couple hours.  Unfortunately, I didn't leave when I should have, but that's another story. :)  Overall, it was a great day.