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Boydo has been eyeing this baby for a while now... and it's unfortunate that he could not be with us on Saturday, but that's how the cookie crumbles...

On Saturday the levels looked just perfect, so Rob, Justin, Tyler and I went there and ran it... Conservation Areas officer did not allow us to put in from the conservation area, but was totally cool with us accessing it from the road above...

More pics and details will be up shortly...




Edit: I think that the best location to access this fall is from the road outside of Conservation Area (Victoria Ave. and 7th Ave.) and use Conservation Area as a take out. Lets keep them happy

BOOM!

ZAP!!

Wish I could have been there... however, Quebec was a pretty awesome place to go boating. I'm just glad my predictions of a deep pool were correct.

You know what's awesome? Having a runnable 35 footer 30 minutes from your house. Come on rain!

I told Yuro I'd get a TR done for Upper Balls today, but I ended up having to go in to work tonight, and I still have to get up early for a meeting tomorrow ... So I'm gonna try to type this TR as fast as I can, and if I forget anything maybe Yuro, Justin, or Tyler can embellish the details.....

So we ran Upper Balls Falls

I knew Justin was looking for people to run Spencers with, and Tyler came down from Peterborough to run Spencers with him... I was only going to scout Upper Balls with Yuro, and wasn't sure if we'd be running anything, so I didn't call Justin about it... but then I got this funny feeling that Upper Balls might turn out to be a great day, so when I was still on the QEW around Oakville I gave Justin a call and asked him if he was interested in joining us...

Yuro and I arrived at the parking lot first... We hiked up and looked at it, and it looked very good. We started chucking stuff off it, and it only looked better... I found a really nice 12 foot long log with a root-ball on one end, and I threw it out on the exact line I thought looked best to run... The log ran the drop straight down, completely disappeared underwater, and came up downstream with the rootball end pointed forwards in the same direction it went over the falls in...

I looked at Yuro and said, "That's it, man... It's good."

We hiked back out to the parking lot just as Justin and Tyler were pulling up with Justin's wife Leah and their baby Brock along for the trip too!

I told them I was running it, and hopefully they'd come along to help with safety and run it if they like... Once Yurii and I started describing the drop everyone got super stoked, and we were all putting on gear and unloading boats as fast as we could...

Then the Conservation Authority Jr. guy showed up... "Uuuh..." He just stared at us... "You gunna put your kayaks in the creek here?" Dude obviously wasn't very bright...

I said we were planning to run the Upper Falls... I didn't want to beat around the bush and make stupid excuses... I explained that we had every right, provided we weren't tresspassing to access the water via private land, and that the Conservation Authority had no jurisdiction over the water...

He said... "Uuuh... Ok... Well... Uhhh... I'll maybe be back..."

(Hey kids, don't drop out of school...)

We were loading our ropes and safety gear when he got back...

"My boss is on the way, and he says if you put your kayaks in the river the cops are coming to arrest you..."

I'm thinking, ok... whatever... I'm sure I can reason with him...

So we waited for boss guy to show up, and I hoped he had at least a highschool diploma so I could communicate with him on some kind of level...

He showed up in a white bimmer...

"You guys aren't allowed to do this... I don't want to have to call the police..."

He seemed capable of enunciating complete sentences, so I explained the situation to him... He said, "ok, well obviously you guys know what you're doing... I can see you have all the gear, and you're familiar with the laws, but I'm not going to allow you to cross the Conservation Area property to get to the river for liability reasons..."

So they let us out of the parking lot for free, and we went upstream to find the next bridge over the creek... No problemo there! It was only 800m up the road on my trip meter! Leah did shuttle-bunny duty, and we put on the creek...

Yuro and I had already scouted the upstream eddy, so we kept our eyes peeled as we boat scouted our way down some mild class I... We could tell the river was VERY flooded, and there was even some pipe for tiling fields alongside the creek where we parked the cars... Obviously the farming in the area contributes to the sudden spikes in the creek levels in Vineland! I guess grapes don't like to be too wet.....

I saw the eddy above the falls that I'd scouted, but from upstream it looked way smaller than I remembered, so we took out early on river left, and portaged down to the falls...

Basically from that point on the rest is history...

Justin and Tyler went down to the bottom and set up live-bait just in case... Yurii grabbed his throw bag and went to the spot he'd scouted for taking pictures...

I stretched, walked up to my boat, gave everyone the thumbs-up, and popped on my Mountain Surf skirt (cheers, John )... Once I peeled out from the eddy I basically let go of everything completely... No nervousness at all... I already knew what I was going to do; I'd decided that because the lip looked almost like the auto-boof on Agers on the Moose, I would just take three hard strokes above the lip, then not boof at all, and just tuck going over... I really didn't want to land flat, since I'd tweaked my back this past fall on the Moshier section of the Beaver by boofing the tiny little 10 footer flat, plus, I was certain it was really deep.

Everything felt great until about 2/3rds of the way down when I realized that I was likely going to go a little over-vertical... I pulled up my knees, and tried to straighten out, then hit the water... Fwoosh! Wow, that's pretty cool! 'cuz of my slightly over-vert angle in I knew I was going to come up upside down, so I set up for a roll and waited... and waited... and waited... Hey, things are getting brighter, and I think that's air on the top side of my blade... Roll... I'm up! WOOHOO!!!!!

After that I told Yurii that the purported 'auto-boof' isn't enough to get you to a perfect angle... "get good speed, and hit a small boof stroke for sure", and from that point on everyone basically nailed it perfectly! Tyler pointed a little too straight over the lip, and some water caught his stern and twisted him to the right, but he worked it out, and came up fine... (It helps to have a fair bit of left angle on this falls... The water kinda goes over the lip at an angle to the left...)

Justin was the last to run, and he absolutely nailed it with a late boof almost in the curtain, and a perfect entry at the bottom.....

Four clean runs...

...then we went and ran Spencers!

(Spencers was a little on the low side, and sh*tballs does it get technical in low water! Definitely a bit easier in the Gauntlet when it's more padded out... in some ways...)

Lastly, I very carefully checked the level on the gauge for yesterday at almost the exact time of the Upper Balls run... 6.275

Spencers gauge says it was at 6.375, but it really felt like the lowest I've run it, and I thought we ran it at 6.3 once...? In any case, I think the min level for Spencers is 6.35, and that's VERY low... It's definitely best above 6.4... 6.5+ for the town run...

R.

OH! Lastly... We really have to give huge props to Boydo for this! This was supposed to be Boydo's darling, and I kinda feel like I snuck the first descent out from under him, but hey... That's what you get for going to Quebec when Escarpment Country is running!

GTA! BOOM!

Here are more pics...

Rob ran it first..



Then it was my turn...



Tyler went little bit more right...



And Justin had the best line...



More pictures here:
http://peppergrinders.livejournal.com/4237.html

Bobbie wrote:
Spencers gauge says it was at 6.375, but it really felt like the lowest I've run it, and I thought we ran it at 6.3 once...? In any case, I think the min level for Spencers is 6.35, and that's VERY low... It's definitely best above 6.4... 6.5+ for the town run...

Lowest we had run the gorge previously was a few weeks back and that was 6.4.
Lowest I've run the town is 6.35.

Awesome heheh... Good work on the firstD

Congratulations.

It looks a lot bigger than 30ft when you see it with the boats for reference.

It must have looked way bigger when you ran over the lip.

Well done.


EDIT: I thought someone posted that it was a 30foot drop. Not sure where I saw that now but measuring it against the boat the drop must be around 40ft.

Perhaps reminiscing about your weekend will take the sting away from not being around for this drop.

Kevin M wrote:EDIT: I thought someone posted that it was a 30foot drop. Not sure where I saw that now but measuring it against the boat the drop must be around 40ft.

When Tyler looked at it he told us that he thinks that it's higher than 30... but the Waterflalls of Ontario says 30... may be we need to re-measure it...
http://www.waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=55

30 was a good guess, more like 10 meters (33 feet) if you want to get nit picky. Compare to rideau falls which looks bigger and its only 12 meters (39 feet)

regardless, still a sick drop, great work guys! Jealous that I haven't had any vertical like this in a while!!!!

does the 100 footer have a pool similar to this one?

The sign post for it at the entrance to the park says 36 feet.
The 100 footer has lots of rocks at the bottom, however, when I looked at it in flood the other week, it didn't look totally un-possible. Definitely requires some probing.

Kevin: we ran the Neilson A and B section, which are spectacular pieces of river. There is no sting, we had good times. Besides, Upper Balls is so close to my house that I will be around it when it is running in the future.

It's been a bunch of years since I did the Nielson.
I only remember it as being "The Neilson"

Great river. You probably smiled the whole way home from that weekend.

A section is the first 12 km of mostly continuous III-IV.
B section Starts at the first significant falls and runs for 5 km, and has 5 significant drops.

Very good times. I am still smiling.