Echo Bend (III+/IV)

One day I hope to return to write a proper guide to this river, but until I have more experience on it I am hesitant to speak on it.

11/1/2025

2.1ft (Eagle River near Eagle River)

Trying to stretch out the paddling season felt easy throughout a rainy October, but towards the end of the month the opportunities began to dry up. One last effort was put forth when Olga and I decided to paddle Echo Bend on the first of November. We saw that the gauge was reading above 2 feet, meaning we should be able to float the stretch of whitewater, but we knew it was going to be very low water. We hiked up from the nature center in the brisk autumn air, and in no time found ourselves on the braids of the Eagle River above the section of rapids. Feeling on top of the world after a prosperous summer of paddling, we elected to skip any warmup and inflated our boats directly above the first drop of Echo Bend. On the trivial first drop, Olga managed to flip her boat. She got back in with only the observation that the glacial river felt cold on the near freezing day. This should have been a clue as to how the day was going to go. 

I let Olga take the lead through the next set of drops, and she began with a scrapey boof off of the left of a rock before weaving through a half dozen more rocks. Seeing her boof did not inspire confidence, so I chose to take the right line off of the first drop and immediately pinned my boat on the rock. It turns out, the right line is a sieve at lower water; a sieve that I was now stuck in. I tried to use my paddle to dislodge myself before using my hands to try and push off of the rock. Quickly, I felt the dexterity in my hands disappearing. I had to make a quick decision if I wanted to have any chance of performing a self-rescue, so I decided to throw my paddle to shore and pull my skirt and separate myself from my boat. As I did, my boat filled with water which pinned it even harder into the sieve. I was able to crawl out of my boat and breach myself on top of the rock next to my boat. In order to dislodge the boat, I had to find a place to rest my feet on the upstream side of the sieve. I carefully dangled my legs and searched for a safe place to stand until I felt confident that I wasn’t going to lose my footing and slip into the sieve. From here, I was able to partially dump my boat of water and release it off the backside of the rock towards the shore. After being sure my boat and paddle were stuck in an eddy near shore, I crawled over the rock and swam my hardest to the shore. Once on the shore, I took a moment to try and warm up, but knew I needed to make it to Olga so she knew I was safe. I loaded up and ran the rest of the rapid, frigid from my time in the water. 

Shaken up by the experience and given the size of the next rapid, we chose to scout the entirety of it. At the low flows, there was merely one line that required tight ferrying skills to stay on through the rapid. After seeing how quickly things could go bad in the cold water, we returned to our boats where we took the high and dry portage line. Below the biggest rapid, we returned to our read-and-run cadence. This largely paid off for the rest of the river, with a few non-consequential swims mixed in.

The major lesson from this trip was that catastrophe can happen quickly on cold rivers, even with all the standard safety gear of warm layers, drysuits, and pogies. I only spent around 90 seconds pinned, but it was long enough to develop the worst case of the screaming barfies I’ve ever experienced and I was likely hypothermic in retrospect. Another minute in the river and things may have ended differently, but I am glad to have learned my lesson and to have added to the seemingly never-ending list of tales that have earned Echo Bend its nickname of Epic Bend.