Trip Report: North Branch Potomac dam release, Sunday, May 19, 2024
By: Hendrik van Oss
This “Bloomington” trip had been scheduled originally for Saturday, May 18 owing to a scheduling conflict for me on May 19. This conflict went away, and because the weather forecast for May 18 persisted in being for rain all/most of the day, I switched the trip to the 19th, which had a more favorable “partly cloudy” forecast. I had opted to spend the night of the 18th in Keyser, and I experienced heavy rain during the drive up there as far as Winchester, VA, but beyond that conditions were clear. There was, however, lots of standing water on many of the roadside properties, and along Rte. 46 between Fort Ashby and Keyser, Patterson Creek and its tributaries were very brown and nearly in flood. Sunday dawned a bit overcast, but this gave way to mostly blue sky by mid-morning and remained this way all day, with air temperature c. 75-degrees. An upstream wind developed in the lower third of the run, but was not particularly bothersome.
The dam release was scheduled to be the usual 1,000 cfs; at the put-in, the RC gauge on the old bridge abutment was just a hair over the 1,000 cfs line (back home, the hydrograph showed that the level was 1,050 – 1,060 cfs during the release). This promised a bouncy and slightly pushy run. Our group had six paddlers, namely Hendrik van Oss (OC1), and five kayakers: Beth Koller, Lisa Laden, Mikki Komlosh, Bill MacFarland, and Paul Walters. Usually, I tend to get out in front of the group but on this trip, Lisa forged ahead of us for much of the way. As the old cobble beach on river left of the concrete railroad embankment rapid is now heavily overgrown and aesthetically displeasing, we opted not to have lunch there but then failed to find a suitable spot downstream and wound-up skipping lunch.
There were a few “new” downed trees projecting from the riverbanks here and there, but all were easily avoided; there was no obstructing wood in Robins Nest rapid, and the wood that had partly blocked left-side access to the midriver flat rock eddy above Top of the World rapid has now cleared somewhat. Indeed, as far as I was concerned, the one bothersome spot on the whole run was right at the beginning in the “entrance” rapid on river right immediately below the put-in. Here, fast-growing overhanging branches from two trees now seem almost impossible to avoid—the low-slung kayakers managed to duck under these, but I had a harder time in my canoe; fortunately, ducking low, I had sufficient momentum to plow through. The rest of the run was all open and bouncy as expected. There was no carnage.