Upper Adams, August 5

The (Lower) Upper Adams is a great medium volume run, pool-drop, but some drops are longer and some of the pools short and swirly. It’s in a canyon and bailing out would require a bit of work. The run is far off the beaten track and starts near Tumtum Lake Provincial Park. The put-in is almost 70 km on logging roads from Vavenby at Sunset Creek Bridge. To start with there were about 6-7 km of very flat water. From maps & GPS it looked like the road is very close to the river about 5 km downstream from the bridge, but we didn't explored this. The rapids begin with a nice class II surf wave and immediately below a weir-like drop with a sneak on the left. After this we scouted probably 4 or 5 drops (IV- to possibly IV), portaged one (mostly because we couldn't scout from the side we were on), ran another we couldn't quite see the bottom of (but could see a pool below). Thanks to Phil for probing that one. We took out at a camp site 18 km below after another 2 km flat. Reportedly there is another run right out of Tumtum Lake, but I haven’t done this one.

Pictures from the Upper Adams on the VKC Forum