Middle Kings - first day on the river

So we spent our first night just before Palisade Creek joins from the river left side and brings an essential amount of water to make the kayaking more worthwhile. Our breakfast consisted of a nice little combination of two slides that marked our start into our first full day on the river.

Camp One in the morning sun

The entrance....

...and the exit

Darin on a random slide of the day

Waterlevels were supposedly medium high, which would mean good things for the rapids up too waterfall alley but maybe too much for the gorges after.

So after some steep, fast bouldergardens, a few bigger slides and some smaller portages we arrived at "Double Drop" one of the famous bigger drops on this run. The line on this steep slide combination is pretty obvious, we all opted for the right entrance and met up in the eddy below.

Manu entering on the right

myself on the second drop, pic by Rok Sribar

Steep bouldergardens continued until one of the little gorges inbetween invited us for a longer scout and made us set safety at a pretty mean little hole.

Rok boofing a sweet drop after the little gorge

What a lot of kayakers that go to California don`t realize is that the rivers here don`t only consist of beautiful clean long slides but actually require a lot of chunky, bouldergarden, steepness skills. This video shows a little bit of the character of the first day.

Then "Superslide" followed, the biggerst and most fun one of the frequendly run slides.

Rok on "Superslide", he`s kinda blurry at the bottom ;)

After a short lunch and boatrepair break we continued our way through some steep and not always clean whitewater until we reached "Waterfall alley" with Devil`s Washbowl in the end, a 15 footer with bad consequences if you mess it iup and swimm into the next drop.

Devil`s Washbowl

We all had pretty good lines, then we opted to go on the trail and portage the next gorges and "Raw Dog" waterfall since the waterlevel was apparently too high for most of this section.
Actually for me this portage was the harderst thing of the day, since my legs were still tired from the hike and shouldering the loaded boat was no joke. After we were back on the river we had only a couple of miles of Class III boogie and a beautiful meadow float left until we sent up Camp 2. This day contained almost all the big slides that I allready knew from videos and pictures, which left me wondering what we will have to deal with the remaining days on the river. Also the "not too low" waterlevel left me a little nervous regarding the "Bottom Nine" that would mark our last day on MFK. But until then we still had our easiest (joking?) day waiting....

next  - the "Middle Four" - the easiest (??) day on the river

cheers, re