Galen practicing his stomp on Wonder Falls. Photo from Hunt Jennings
Alex Muck nailing her boof stroke on Wonder Falls. Photo from Hunt Jennings.
Coach Dow runs Big Splat. Photo by Anna Bruno.
We spent the whole of last week in Phillipi, WV, where we got super lucky with levels, and got to run the Cheat, the Tygart, Laurel creek, and my favorite, the Big Sandy. The Big Sandy feeds into the same take-out as the Cheat, making it a fun and convenient run. Our 2nd quarter coach uncle Jake Greenbaum joined up with us to take us down. He is a local in the area and knows the run better than anybody.
After a rather long walk in we made it to the put-in. The river was a larger volume creek and had a good amount of flow in it. The river began with a couple miles of class III IV boogie water until we got to a sweet 20 footer that the Big Sandy is known for, called Wonder falls.
The 20 footer had a great lip on the left and a big hole on the right. After amazing our audience by telling them that we were going to ride our boats over the falling water we hit the drop up. Chris Smith went third and showed us that if you don’t boof, and don’t bring any speed to the lip, the hole below the drop was not as innocent looking as we thought.
Despite the epic beat down, almost all of the kids still wanted to fire the drop up and did. Alex Muck styled the line, and had one of her best boofs ever. After the 20 footer the run picked up. We ran about 3 or 4 miles of steady class four which is really fun. The continuous river made the rapids go by very fast.
The next big rapid was called big splat. Most of the coaches, Hunt, and Galen ran big splat. Big splat is a two move rapid. It has a class IV entrance rapid followed by a 10 foot boof in which you have to drive left off of while boofing to avoid a large rock and hole at the bottom. I loved the drop and it made my day. It was a good mix between a hard move to make and a little bit of consequence.We all ran it well with the worst line only being me going a little to far right. The rest of the run followed as most of the run had. Jake showed me a bunch of sweet little lines that are not a part of the main run.
It was a great day and the Big Sandy is one of the best runs that we have done 4th quarter and definitely the best run for the whole school because everyone could run it. It was Great Success! Thanks Jake and Chris for showing us down.
