Ashnola River & Copper Falls

by Ryan Bayes

Here’s a video and some pics from our trip to the Similkameen River with the Vancouver Kayak Club. July 4&5 2008. First mission on this weekend was to drop the falls on Copper Creek a few minutes east of Manning Park. Copper Creek runs under the highway through a cave made into the rock and spills out the other side off a 15 footish waterfall. Only sketchy part is you cant see all the way through the cave from either side because of a slight left hand bend. I ran first and hugged the right hand wall because I could see more of that side. I did however not make the move back to center where I wanted to run the falls. This can be seen in the video as I ditched the boof stroke to try and turn myself away from a rock nugget hanging out from river right. Jay ran next and had a better line, not knowing how deep it was we had planned on boofing somewhat as to not find out how deep it was or wasn’t. Dan went last, this would also turn out to be the last thing he would paddle that weekend. He hammered down through the middle and put just a little to much boof juice into his stroke and had a really flat and painful landing. This would be why we have so much footage and were not hiking shuttles all weekend.

Note to self, save the park and hucks for the drive home!

Me and some rock getting friendly

Jay doing Jay stuff

Bentley with the Robo Cop boof launch

Entrance to the cave under the freeway

Me and Jay on the Ashnola

The club put in at Bromley Rock for the Similkameen

Me dropin into"Golden Dawn"