Canoeing the Elbow River Above Bragg Creek
I've wanted to paddle the Upper Elbow for ages. The information available to paddlers is poor, considering the river's proximity to Calgary. I found three sources of information. One said that the paddling was generally OK, but the source was old. A local online paddling resource described it as a "Class 1 float" - but I knew that source to be crammed with ego stroking that takes no account of open boats, so chose to disregard it. The third was an account of a fairly epic descent made by someone who doesn't paddle whitewater. That site shows a V-shaped ledge near the Bragg Creek Provincial Park. I walked to it one winter, and it was about a metre high. Reconcile that with "Class I float" if you will. All of these accounts pre-dated the 2013 flood.
Since those floods, the river was likely to have changed anyway. When we decided to run this reach as a short evening trip, I was a little more wary than usual, and we carried saws, just in case.
It was a lovely June evening. The summits of Banded Peak, Mt. Glasgow and Mt. Cornwall peeped over the skyline at the Allen Bill put-in. This used to be a pretty little pond where families messed about in dinghies. Now it has all the charm of a disused gravel pit...it'll be a while before vegetation returns to this spot. Truncated asphalt walkways and mangled picnic benches serve as reminders of 2013, and a warning of what might lie downstream.
We scouted a small rapid at the put-in. It would be tight, and there was a clear sweeper hazard, but Lindsey and I waded out into the river and managed to remove the worst of the logs, reducing their potential to drown people in the first thirty seconds of the trip. Even at 14 CMS (cubic metres per second) of flow, the river was fairly ripping through here, and it was clear that we'd be doing plenty of scouting from the shore on this trip.
After the highway 66 bridge there was a fun little boulder garden, which set the scene for about 4 km of small ledges and boulders with few flood-related hazards. Marise took an early bath on one of these, but it could have been any of us really; with such low water, it was difficult to avoid every boulder, and easy to get tipped out. The water was not deep, and it was easy to wade in, and help to bring her boat back to shore for emptying.
About a third of the way down the reach, the river changed its tune. The ledges vanished, and the river became more braided. Sweeper hazards developed on bends and steeper sections. One notable section was opposite the film set for "North of 60", which was filmed here more than a decade ago. Here, the left channel was blocked by a sweeper, and the right overflow channel was only a few inches deep. We had to drag out boats for much of this section, but probably at a flow of 20 CMS or so, the right-hand channel would provide a fun and bouncy bypass.
In total, I think I walked four short parts of the middle third of the run. Near the end of the "woody section" there was one sneaky sweeper, where the channel looked open until I walked right down to it, discovering a boat-level tree trunk that extended fully across the channel on a narrow, dropping right-hand bend. Scouting definitely paid off on that one! We only had one mishap: I'd declined to run a feature where a submerged tree trunk forced paddlers to the right-hand side of the river, just as it dropped and turned left. On the right-hand shore of the bend was a tree's root-ball, which stuck into the channel. Mike decided to run the bend, and was rewarded with a side-swiping smack from the root-ball. Lindsey, in her kayak, figured that she'd be more able to nip back into the channel before the bend, but this proved optimistic, and she took a root to the face before flipping. She self-rescued, but it was a good reminder to all of us that this is a fast-moving river even when it's low, and that you're never quite as nimble on the water as you'd like to think!
After the woody section came a beautiful winding reach that lacked unavoidable sweepers, and some small ledges and rock gardens. The sun was setting as we drifted between steep, loose cliffs, noticing increasing signs of habitation on the shores. We noticed how clean the water smelled, compared to that of the Lower Kananaskis, which has a "been lingering at the bottom of a lake for a few years" odour, despite its clarity.
I'd been looking out for the metre-high ledge all the way through this part, and so was surprised to suddenly find myself near the road and the take-out, with no sign of it. The 2013 floods appear to have either buried or ripped that ledge out, removing a major feature from the overall set of difficulties. It's hard to grade this reach of the river. If you are in control, and able to pull out and portage where necessary, then it's probably Class II to II+ at the water levels we encountered, and for the sections that we ran; the proximity of the shore and generally shallow water remove some of the danger, but there's plenty of rock dodging to do. Some of those sections that we walked are presently not safely and reliably passable. A little more water might make this reach easier, but a lot more (e.g. 25-30 CMS), coupled with the gradient, could create some dangerous and rapidly-approaching situations. Less water, and it would stop being fun.
The reach is around 12 km long. We took three hours; probably an hour of that was spent scouting. I think that I'd do exactly the same amount of scouting next time, just to be safe. Some of the logjams could be altered by hand, which means that a change in river level could do the same thing, creating new hazards. I'd certainly do this run again, but I'd be careful to assess the abilities of my paddling partners; people unable to eddy out at will could easily run onto trouble on this water. We say a few deflated, discarded inflatable rafts on the shore (presumably people think that they'll just evaporate in the sun after a while...), so it's likely that "floating" is a popular activity here, perhaps after downing a few beers or alcopops on a sunny day. They do the same thing on the Upper Kananaskis (Class III), so don't take it as a sign that this is just an easy novice-level float!
