A big cold day on the Root

Last night Scott Kelly and I took advantage of the rain and hit the Root in Racine after work.  Unfortunately, a nice cold blast has followed the rain so we were getting wet on an extremely windy 30 degree night.  I was going to have a nice picture of the frost on my skirt to post, but the batteries in my camera decided it was too cold to work.  Guess I should have changed them before we left.  The water was the biggest I have seen closer than a 7-hour drive.  Being a swollen creek there wasn’t much in the way of eddy service, so if you don’t have a good ride you have to hike it back up.  Fortunately, it is a short walk. 

 

From looking at the gauge online it looks like we started off in the area of 1100 cfs and increased to around 1300, maybe even 1400 by the time we got off.  We could tell that it was surging, and the one spot that we played the most there were some definite changes.  The wave would go from frothy with a good pile to smooth and real fast.  Though at these levels the bottom wave is pretty bouncing and hard to stick on.  It was changing a lot, and sometimes would change in between rides.  We tried the monster in the middle a couple of times.  It was really cool crossing the river on a wave and dropping 3 feet into to the pocket.  Watching Scott from downstream he would disappear behind the wave, I couldn’t see his head.  But man was it a cold walk to the car after.  Can’t wait until the warm rain starts.