We stayed in White Salmon last weekend and the Sunday Oregonian had a front page story about the blasting of the 80 year old Condit Dam…to aid fish habitat on the White Salmon River. The dam had caused the formation of a “lake” where a river had been…Northwestern Lake, as it is called.
Since we were right there, I slipped into intrepid-girl-reporter mode and we set off to catch sight of the dam… As you can imagine, they won’t let anybody near it
so we went to Northwestern Lake to see how it looks…the dam hasn’t been removed yet, but they’ve begun increasing the spill and the lake level has dropped dramtically leaving docks and property owners high and dry:
A big business in the last 15 years has grown up around the white water sections of this river
and others nearby (The Klickitat is an especially dramatic river ride Jennifer said…several people killed each year). We headed to the bridge at Husum to check the action and arrived in time to see a raft that was finishing a portage and then shoving off
but the REAL fun happened when the kayaks arrived…there were four:
the blue boat and the red boat immediately took the portage and got back in the water
and then we noticed that the blue boat guy had a camera on his helmet
and we saw that we had a drama!! The guy in the white boat in a funny outfit went first
and according to OUR narrative this was all for the yellow boat…fancy boat, fancy outfit, photographer at the ready, same result!
oops…so we headed up to BZ Corner to discover views further upstream
A fascinating afternoon…
On The Way 
wild, wild, water !!!
I guess we can watch the helmet cam video on YouTube. Great pix.
I think I want a helmet cam…
Great report intrepid reporter! I almost felt like I was there.
I replied on Facebook but it’s not showing up so here goes again! Very nice coverage..about 35 years ago Mr. Green talked me into going down the Snake River with him and 2 other couples in 3 six person rafts. No guides of course. We were intrepid! There are 3 highly rated rapids on that portion of the Snake — of course we pulled out and scouted each before attempting them. Sortof technical on how you go thru — like you don’t want to get caught in the whirlpool where a couple of dinghy’s went down and everyone with them. Anyway — I will never forget how calm the water is just before a large rapid — but you can hear the roar getting closer and closer until you finally are in it. Made the first two — Granite and Wild Sheep I believe are the names — but overturned in Waterspout — took ten minutes to get out of the current and to shore. Saving grace was that the water was very warm that time of year. We lived to tell the tale — did the Kilickitat about 15 years ago and have done the mild Deschutes twice with the grandkids. Will I do it again? Probably not but we have old fashioned 8mm movies if we want to relive the Snake adventure!
Carol Green
P.S. It rained every day on the Snake — we had no tents and crawled into wet steamy sleeping bags at night — ran out of food on the third day and some nice professors from the U of Idaho took pity on us and let us stay under their tarp and eat their food for a few hours before continuing on to our take out point.