Across the Curtain: The Big Kimshizzle

The Big Kimshew has earned itself some lure over the last few years with some epic stories of destroyed boats, massive swims and even a helicopter rescue for a serious head injury. Less than a mile into the run our group of 11 had had already ticked off 4 broken paddles and the trail of carnage continued.
We were a huge group with lots of virgins to the run and a limited number who had set their paddles in the Big Kimshew's waters before. We split up into two groups from the get go and in the interest of making some space between those behind us, i tacked onto the front group and the shit began from the first eddy-out.
Tayler Robertson lead our group and was spot-on with his simple beta. Had i looked at any of these rapids i would have been shitting myself but with simple beta like "Start left, move right and look for a boof flake" the what-if fears of "that crack" or "that hole" or "that cave" never really materialized and we made quick progress of some of the biggest drops i had ever run (blind or with scouting). The first,and one of the few, thankfully, moves that i missed was 4 or 5 drops into it where we all bobbed in a small river left eddy. Looking downstream our view through a crack between large boulders didn't reveal much except for a large amount of gradient being lost over a short distance. Gulp. "Slide through this crack and then start moving right and keep you're head up for the horizon line, it'll be busy in there".
Sure, Move right, busy, find the horizon line - i can do that....Plop, scramble, brace, scramble, drive - shit, shit, that was the....hooooorriiiiizon, and then i went over the handle bars off the first 20footer after prematurely boofing what i thought was the horizon line, only to launch myself out then reconnect and free-fall for long enough to see that i was still river center and not doing a good job of things. Thats how the first quote of the day seemed to form itself. "I hope this goes well" seemed to replay over and over as we bombed down slides, through holes, and boofed our hearts out through blind rapid after blind rapid just "hoping this goes well" the whole way through.
Its always a dilemma to run something blind for the first time. On one side, you only get the chance to run a drop blind once in a life time and if you look at it you'll never get that opportunity again. It also heightens the excitement when you drop over a horizon line and your first views of the whitewater come from cockpit level and your commitment to the drop has already been made. Yet the other side of the story reads to the more cautious, with a quick view of a drop you can see the line, you know the move and you're way more likely to run it clean...I guess it all comes down to how much you trust your friends beta, what the consequences of a missed line are and what your comfort level is...either way, its still good shit.
So back to the Kimshew and the 2nd quote of the day "Go where i go, dont go where i dont go". I almost chuckle rethinking how simple the day's beta seemed. Although following the leader can be realistically extremely challenging, the idea of it is actually quite simple - Go where i go, dont go where i dont go. And so was the moto for the bombing through some of the long, complicated and often sieved our boulder gardens on the Kimshew that are scattered at random between large bedrock drops.
The day went on with bits of carnage here and there. With the number of significant drops littered down this run you can more or less expect the rivers wrath to rein down on you at some point during the day. Korbulic fired up the big triple drop after watching Ben Stooksberry style his line, unfortunately things didn't go as well for Chris and "Backwards and nearly upside down" would be a more fitting name for the drop after Mr. K ran it and broke his boat...OOOOOPPPPPPPSS. Ha, he was thankfully alright after getting fished out of an unescapeable pocket eddy , and so now we can laugh about it.
Anyways, enough talking. The only thing left to say is that this creek is so good that it ends with an epic 15 foot boof 100ft from the take-out after 4 hours of epic paddling already.
Not too many pictures got taken since we routed most of the rapids and didn't get out of the boat much. What i've got is a small compilation of pictures from both me, Jono and Darin McQuiod after a couple different laps down the river.

En-jiggity-joy