The
Trail Under Bloomer Falls
T Creek
Talking about trails, they come in lots of varieties after all, I’ve got a strange one. It was only there for one summer and I don’t know what it looked like before I saw it two summers ago, but since that year it’s disappeared.
Summer
2002, was a
Looking up from under Bloomer Falls
low, low water year.
We hadn’t been able to boat the
Salmon River since late May. Lousy for boating ,but good for
swimming and diving the crystal clear holes up and down the river.
Because of the extremely low water that year, pretty much from late July
thru September, before the rains returned, there was this underwater trail
up the neck at the bottom of Bloomer Falls and to the bedrock pool
directly under the falls themselves.
The entry on river left was to do the old seal rolling dive to the bottom of the narrow little gorge created by the rather famous rock a the bottom of the Bloomer Falls that scares a couple of years off the lives of hundreds of boaters each year. Ten, twelve feet to the bottom, under the buckskin, thigh-sized limb jammed between the river left wall and the rock, at the surface. Down there the bottom current was slower and the turbulence of the compressed water was above you. It was possible to swim about 10 meters up river and surface in a pocket eddy on river right. You were then just below the pool that the falls exploded into billions of crystals cut by the impact of the cascade, drops of water shattering violently, to live brilliantly brief seconds in the sunlit air above before dying into the surface of the river once more, and being whisked at mach I into the dark river current.
From the eddy you could almost reach out and touch the falls across the final pool. You couldn’t do the little dive over the sharp ridge of barrier bedrock, or you’d quickly be pounded right back into the wall by the power of the falls.
The hole at the base of Bloomer Falls was an almost perfect circle with another small pocket eddy, just below the main hole on the other side of the river. Never found the underwater trail into that one.
No way in from the surface, but an underwater reconnaissance revealed a low point in the bedrock pocket. Every now and then the white water brilliance of the aerated water broke briefly and through the green, still window you could see the way in.
Sucking in a great breath, I dropped straight
down and putting my hands of the low spot of granite bedrock, I thrust my
whole body over the ridge, kicking mightily with my fins and down to the
calm clear water at the sandy bottom of the falls. The first trip was an in
and out kind of affair, but in subsequent visits under the falls I found I
could turn over, look up with my back on the sand bottom of the cup-shaped
bowl, and see the wildly aerated water, about three feet of still, clear
green river above my position directly under the main falls. Still later I
found an undercut behind the falls that I could tuck into and take pictures
of the falls and even one of Merlin right at the green/aerated water
interface. Very cool.
An interesting example of trail to be sure, but not what really made it different, totally unique. Once in the bowl below the falls you had a second heart beat. I don’t mean the adrenaline heart beat, but an outside compressive beat. The pressure of the falling water on the trapped water at the bottom of the granite cup compressed my whole body in with a wild, external heartbeat. It was overwhelmingly powerful. It was disconcerting at first, but gradually as the summer wore on and I returned week after week, I got to really liking it. It was like a mantra that vibrated my whole existence. It was the peace of the perfect harmony within perfect place