La Grange to Turlock State Recreation Area (leg 3)

As soon as we arrived a put-in, I ventured out onto the rusty Old La Grange bridge, now unfit for cars, serving as a pedestrian crossing only, and peered down into the clear, clean water below. This was it - the Tuolumne below Don Pedro - and I was surprised to see what looked like a healthy flow and vibrant riparian corridor. Swallows circled below the bridge, returning briefly to their nests plastered under the bridge's steel girders, to feed their young who prepared for flight inside their mud houses. With the water clear enough to see the river's gravel beds, I imagined them thick with the thrashing tails of salmon, which numbered once in the hundreds of thousands but who's count in recent years has resembled something more like an 80-year high school reunion.

Shortly, our guests for the day arrived at which point we carried our five boats to the water's edge and pushed off into the green water. These first 8 miles was without a doubt the most challenging class 1 section of river I have ever boated. The gradient was never steep enough the warrant the term white-water, yet the high flows created a very pushy feeling and due to years of "fish-flow" releases from Don Pedro, vegetation had completely crowded the banks forming one continuous strainer lining both sides of the river. Every few hundred yards there was another island which also hosted overgrown vegetation, often with a broken branch or two dangling in the river and bending wherever the current would direct it. This was not a place you wanted to swim; the goal was to stay away from the banks and navigate through the maze of islands. At one point the river was so constricted with vegetation that the guides had to make an S-turn which required a brief upstream velocity to avoid being swallowed by a heinous strainer.

Soon enough we floated into calmer stretches and folks began to relax into the day. A Golden Eagle soared downstream and many other birds crossed the skies calling to each other as they enjoyed the clear blue skies.