60 degrees and raining. As much as global warming scares me, it is hard not to love being able to feel my fingers after kayaking in January.

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The Llancahue borns on the south face of the Villarrica volcano. We went to have a look to a new section of the Llancahue, but right now there’s too much water. The Llancahue is a really wet river, with deep canyons with plenty of vegetation and volcanic rock from the eruptions of the Villarrica volcano. It’s really hard to scout, so it’s hard to put-in and take-out of the river. We spent a day scouting a small part of the river and looking for a take-out, but the canyon is too deep, so you have to run the whole section.

South face of the Villarrica volcano in the evening.

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Just back from an awesome mission to Portugal, and I reckon it ranks on a par with Corsica and Italy in terms of quality whitewater.

Highlight of the trip was probably a run down the beautiful Castro in dense fog. Smooth, clean granite slides and drops.

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The Saltos del Mariman is a really big rapid on the Upper Trancura. It’s aportage also. It has two lines the main channel on the right and a waterfall on the left. I’ve already run the left line in high water, but I was waiting for lower water to run the big line.

The entry is like 2 metres drop, then a huge hole from wall to wall, and then a nice drop with some hard retention on the landing.

       Scouting the main channel.                                                               On the lip.

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I’ve recently moved back to White Salmon, Washington for the winter. Fortunately the water is high right now, unfortunately the weather is cold and snowy.

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We have just returned to freezing cold Canada after Exploring Malaysia and the entire length of Vietnam. All the way from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) to the Chinese border… travelling in a 40 seater bus with 4 other paddlers and a translater. Malaysia offered up some pretty fun rivers as well and a lot of potential for future trips. Check out the next YGP flic “THe Source” for the footage…photos at www.triberiders.ca

The Fuy is a really nice river close to Pucon. We paddled the upper section, a class III-IV river with some nice rapids and really beautyful landscape. I paddled it in the 4TWENTY because it’s an easy river with lots of good waves to play.

            Nice valley.                                               Chosuenco volcano.

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      After an fantastic trip to New Zealand its good to be back on my local run.  I had a good weekend, despite a disappointing day on sunday after lots of rain but still low water and a trip to A&E for a friend.                                       

After paddling the Gol Gol we crossed the border to Argentina. We drove to Bariloche, a big touristic city in the south of Argentina near Patagonia. Once there we went to the Nahuel Huapi National Park to paddel the río Manso.

Cerros near Bariloche.
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I’ve been paddling in the south of Chile and Argentina. I’ve paddled the Gol Gol, a really nice river with lots of waterfalls. The Gol gol borns in the Chilean border with Argentina. The section is just 6 km, but with lots of nice rapids, most of them drops, from thtree to 15 metres. We were lucky to paddel the Gol gol with a pretty good waterlevel.

Here some photos of the river.

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I’ve just came back from a trip to the north, the Rio Claro again. We went there to run the first descent of the canyon of te rio Claro, a really nice section between the 22 and the 7 cups. It’s a 6 km section with a first nice canyon and a second really deep canyon. This is not a really hard canyon but it’s really deep, so you can’t see what’s inside and once you are in there’s no way to get out, so I think it’s why it has never been paddled before. We spent a whole day for the scouting, climbing, walking… It was really hard. On the evening we have scout mostly all the canyon, and we decided to run it the next morning. We woke up early and get to the water. The rapids of the first canyon were really cool, then we arrived to the big canyon. We ran this amazing slide, and then continue with the following rapids, that were nice too. So a really cool first descent of the canyon of the rio Claro, Chile.

Some cool photos of the canyon.

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Copyright 2007
the photographer does not wish to be recognized due to the focus of the photos!!!!!

Back in Hood River again!

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The last few months have seen the mighty father Thames (south east of the Blighty) flowing at some very high levels.  My local weir  Shepperton has been producing a wide variety of features over the last couple of weeks, as the water rises and falls, from closed out deep stoppers that pull the leaves from surounding trees to a large clean green wave. Below are a few pictures we tock this morning.  The 4 twenty works really well, but not quite as fun as the Ammo, try to get some pictures of that tonight!