AUTHOR'S NOTE: Skull Rapid, is regarded as the meanest rapid in Westwater Canyon. It's not the big waves or the technical run that makes it scary - It's what happens if you screw up. Let me use a little little diagram to help illustrate my point.
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In the poorly drawn diagram at left, I illustrate how you approach Skull Rapid. The water flow is shown by the arrows. The main current goes downstream to where there is a bend it the canyon. As the river goes left, there is a big outcropping of rock in the middle of the turn. Over thousands of years, water hit this outcropping and carved a circular indention into the canyon wall to the right of the rock. Today, water from the current hits this rock dead on, dividing the curent sending half downstream and half into the cutaway, known as "The Room of Doom." In the room, the water goes round and around, in a continual cycle. Because a lot of the river continues downstream, there is an eddy line current that flows on to the left that runs alongside the current that is recirculating in the whirlpooling Room of Doom (see small little arrows along the entrance of the Room). |
People die in the Room of Doom. I came across a website about another boater's trip down Westwater Canyon. His name is Dave Dennis. In an e-mail he sent me about his trip, he stated:
"There truly was a body in The Room of Doom that day - we went by fast and didn't even realize that what Wayne saw was a dead person till a kayaker told us farther down river. Knowing Skull, you have seen all the junk that floats around and around in the Room, so you could understand."
"I usually describe Skull as a screaming left hand turn with a huge left lateral on the left off Razor Rock, and an eddy fence on the right that guards The Room. The center is Skull hole which can be one big sucker at high water. The Wall of shame is the end of the eddy at The Room, and is not a good place to pile into if you run the right side! That is how the rafter died two weeks before we passed him. He was thought to be stuck under an undercut in the wall until he popped up that day. I usually run left of Skull hole, but have run the right a few times."
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. Because of the high water when we made our decent, there had been widespread flooding upstream of the canyon. The river had flowed out of its bed in into farmland, where some sheep and cows had been swept away. One of those sheep was in the Room of Doom the day we went down it. Now that you understand the perils of Skull Rapid, and the room of doom, let's continue our story...
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Page Created and Maintained by: Kev Summitt. |
