Those who came first:the story of Dry/Coon

On Monday March 28,2011 myself and Matthew Wallace ran the first decent of Dry/Coon creek in Alabama.We heard about this run from some local veterans and researched it on topos and the internet waiting for the right time to go in there.After finding eveything else on the mountain too high,we decided that today is the day.We negotiated a long tricky shuttle to the top of the mountain and parked at a beaver pond the road went into.Using some satillite images of the area we hiked the rest of the way and shortly found the creek.

The flow at the put-in

We estimated our flow to be low but good and put on to a river only one group had ever tried before to our knowledge.Without their efforts we may have never seen this awesome run.The first rapid had wood but still runnable and was good class 3/4 action and then we were already at the falls,which was made obvious by the horizon dropping away.We knew there was a waterfall in the beginning and kinda thought it would be a portage,to our surprise it was an amazing series of drop to slide to drop that lost about 40-50 feet of gradient and was very runnable!We called this drop "the Creecher".




 

The bottom tier of the creecher

After being high on life at the creecher,we moved on downstream to some great continuous class 4 stuff.

the first rapid in a long class 4 set

Good boofs and slides just kept coming at us and we started to realize that this might be a great run,one of the best!After every scout we found more great low volume whitewater.

myself in some boogie

boofing dry/coon

Near the end of this section were some bad pin spots that spiced up a few small drops,and then it started to mellow out and a trib came in on the right which we knew meant the gorge was coming.We thought that maybe we were done after a good bit of flats then we rounded the corner to the entire creek squeezing between huge boulders and dropping out of sight and we knew then it was just getting started.A tight entry boof got us into the gorge and to the first mandantory portage.The whole river swirled down a toilet bowl sieve into a pile of rocks and then shot out the backside like nothing I have ever seen before.The river drops 200 feet in half a mile in this section and there was no shortage of action.

Wallace grinds the bottom of a 3 part class V boulder pile

another nice grind boof with the previous drops in the background

After the first few rapids,the difficulty ramped up a bit to solid class 5 rapids one after another down to where a culvert pipe creates a mandantory portage.The last section before the pipes was good class 5 or 5+ and there was one more surprise rapid after the pipes and it mellowed out into the lake.This was an amazing river to get the first decent of and would not have happened if it werent for those who came first and layed the groundwork for us.We truly got lucky on this one.For more info check southernboof.com and alabamawhitewater.com.CM