Little White Salmon Giant Slalom Race

This past weekend I traveled down to the Columbia River Gorge to compete in the the Little White Salmon DR/Giant Slalom race. I traveled down thursday night and was lucky enough to have a roof over my head at the Beaver Lodge on Northwestern Lake. Friday I paddled with Chris Korbulic and Jono down the little white. We managed to do two laps in a short period of time and I felt good about all the lines, I could easily remember all the major drops and the gettin busy through to Island drop was all pretty good read and run. Unfortunately at the end of the day I discovered three cracks in by boat when I was unable to locate another rocker to use I decided to use duct tape and hope for the best.

On saturday I had a good day and managed to make it down in good time considering it was only my second day in a creek boat in the last 7 months, and I only had two runs down a fifteen minute course. I ended up finishing 13th out of 18 boaters and 3 minutes behind Tao who won the downriver portion. After the race was the Spirit falls huck fest which is one of my new favorite waterfalls.

Wishbone and the finish of the DR portion Photo: Bo Wallace

Sunday was the Giant Slalom and when I got down to Boulder Sluice and had my first look at the course I was super excited, with seven gates and an obvious difficult move from gate 2 to gate 3 it looked to be a short challenging course. I was able to put together two good clean runs without missing a gate, only five of the fourteen boaters managed to accomplish that. I ended up finishing second only to Todd Anderson who also took home the over all crown. The strong finish in the slalom also managed to bump me up to 4th in the overall standings only falling to Todd Anderson, Geoff Calhoun and Tao Berman. For full results and report check out the LVM blog.

On Monday me Jono, and Alex went for a good run down the Green Truss section of the White Salmon which is another classic run and the only mishap was me punching myself in the face while running BZ falls, which resulted in a bloody nose and split lip.

Jono checkin out Big Brother after stylish run

If you have the chance definitely make the trip to the Columbia River Gorge and any of the remaining Giant Slalom events this year.