A look at the part of the river that will be flooded once the Auburn Dam is built.
An excerpt.
Editorial Notebook: A rapids swim, a lesson learned
Published 12:01 am PDT Saturday, July 29, 2006
From trail or road in the Auburn State Recreation Area, the American River below looks sleepy and slow, the rapids like mere riffles. Rocks sparkle. Sunlight filters through leaves. The canyon landscape looks more peaceful than wild.
I'd never been on the river, though my husband and I hike a lot in the park and have seen glimpses of its wild side -- a bobcat, pipevine swallowtail butterflies, wild turkeys. This season the waters beckoned.
We signed on for a rafting trip with the Friends of the River for the Class II seven-mile run from Drivers Flat Road to Mammoth Bar on the Middle Fork.
We put on our life preservers and listened as our guides gave a safety talk to our 18-member group. Then off we went in four rafts, two kayaks and one cataraft.
The first rapid was gentle, no challenges, but fast enough to be fun, good for learning to follow the guide's commands and to paddle in unison.
But even Class II rapids have risks that must be respected. At a rapid about a third of the way into the trip, our raft hit a rock. I was in the boat one moment and out the next. I hit the water and immediately slammed into a submerged boulder.
The terror began. My first thought was, "Did I just break my back?" And then, as I bounced a pinball route, "I could break a lot of bones."
But I didn't have time to dwell on this. I was swept into the backwash of a big rock ledge with water rushing over my head and couldn't break through to get air. Only after what seemed an eternity did I manage to push through and head downstream.
The safety instructions to get feet and butt up came to mind -- I was not going to go downstream head-first. Eventually I floated into calm waters, feeling like a playful sea otter, feet up, hands across chest, glad to be in one piece, though coughing from the water I'd inhaled somewhere along the way.
I learned a hard lesson: In a rapid, you are on your own. No one can do anything to help you until you extricate yourself and get to calmer waters.
Continuing our journey, I got down low as we approached new rapids. We picked blackberries along the shore, saw trout and waterfowl, had water fights with other rafts. Our guides prepared a grand feast at our Mammoth Bar exit, just above Murderer's Gorge.
On the surface, this park seems an unlikely place for a wilderness experience. The area was the site of hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush era; whole hillsides were hosed into the river. The river is full of dams and hydroelectric power plants; river flows are managed.
Some uses remain from the "anything goes" attitude when everyone assumed the park would be buried underwater by the on-again, off-again Auburn dam, proposed 40 years ago but never built. For example, we came across miners using an extremely loud, powerful, high-pressure, gas-powered suction dredge in the river. Park rules say you can pick up gold nuggets and pan for placer gold (flakes) using gold pans but no other tools, such as picks or shovels.
