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Laura Brinkley with help from Bill Thornton:
This is a surprisingly good run but is only worth doing if it is totally flooded everywhere else. It is hard enough
to catch the normal Bear Creek run, let alone the upper part. At the put-in the creek is maybe 10-15' feet wide
and it stays that way for a lot of the run.
The first real rapid we come up on looked schweet. We were all ready to run it. When you get down to the bottom
drop, the lovely land owners have run a cable across it. Another grunt portage. Apparently, this also is unposted
private property. We portaged on river right with a land owner screaming at us across the river. This was the smallest
of the three slides. This can certainly be run.
The next rapid was a huge slide. Probably 100-150' long and shallow. Enter in the center and ride it. The river
left wall looked undercut. Huge fast slide, it was schweeet. About half way down it breaks right.
The next big slide was steeper and perhaps runnable (it is), it was also probably in the range of 100-150'. It
is more of a sliding lead-in to a 30' steep falls. We had already started carrying boats around it and no one was
interested in carrying back to run it. Towards the bottom it looked like the wall on river right was undercut.
There is a very nice half mile class 4 gorge below the last falls. For anyone who needs to hike out there is a
dirt road at the last slide which eventually ends up around 35.
Upper Bear currently harbors more portages around strainers than I can count. Portages are through thick gear gouging
briars and holly. My hands are still cut up, I couldn't imagine what it would be like in the summer with everything
grown up. At some times I was throwing my boat ahead of me to mash down the briars. The creek being so narrow there
are places where it is just wide enough to get through because the bushes were growing out from the banks. Eddies
were in these bushes which means hold on to that branch or root. If you have the patience for all the portages
(make sure you wear pants) 11" is a good level. Everything else was flooded and we didn't have many options.
I talked to the land owners a good bit at the third slide, very nice people. They had owned that land for over
15 years and had never seen a kayaker on it, I am guessing that it is not run often. No one in our group had been
on it before.
Shorter shuttles exist but they are complex and I don't know the road names
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