Gulf Hagas

A little while back Alex Bender, Dan Mcgrath and I were in the Moosehead lake region for a weekend of paddling and hanging out. We had planned on just heading to the seboomook and west branch, but with a few scattered reports of rain in the area we decided to load the creekboats just in case. On Saturday we took a quick run on Seboomook in the morning, headed over to the West Branch for a gorge/crib lap or two in the afternoon, and then called it a day. As we were getting ready to head down to Greenville for the night the skies completely opened up and rain just pummeled the ground. A little smile started to grow on each of our faces... we knew we had a chance of making it over to Gulf Hagas if this kept up. No one said anything, we didn't want to jinx it, but it looked like the clouds were sticking around all night.

...skip over the rest of the night, hoping for more and more rain...

We packed up early, headed over the gauge bridge, and were pleasantly surprised to find just enough water. The level was about 3 inches below the abutment, definitely on the low side, but completely runnable. We got in our boats as fast as possible and headed downstream. It was a great way to end what was an amazing creeking season. This spring had more new rivers and creeks for all of us than in the past two years combined. Here are a few pics, whish we had taken more but we were all too excited to bust out the camera much. Make it up there if you get any chance at all!

Alex drops over Billings



Myself running the left side of faceplant, contrast this to how much water was in the Karen Roy article in No Umbrella... completely different river at the two levels I'm sure.



...and about to drop over Buttermilk



The first series of drops from downstream. The water was low, but all the lines were there and everything was runnable.



Dan drops over Billings



Could maybe have used a little more water



The whole run was just beautiful drop, boogie water, beautiful drop, boogie water... all deep in the gorge



followed by a 5 mile walk, uphill, to the car. The foot shuttle sucks for this one.



Hope you enjoy, if you ever get a chance to get up there, go go go. The water was low at 3 inches below, but I'm sure you could run even a few more inches down.