This trip report written by Jed Miller.

What helps make a great low water Bruneau float?

• Good tires (I bought new ones just for this trip)
• Sound vehicle
• Slick bottomed tubes
• Open floor frames

Wednesday launch, moved up from Thursday due to colder temps forecast beyond Tuesday. (Too bad because in fact it got warm on Thursday and Friday and brought flows back up above 800 which would have made 5 mile much easier than the 540 flows we ran it at on Friday ;))

Took out Saturday at noon.

Weather was great. Road still sucks. Still loads of Poison Ivy. Fantastic trip.

Based on weather and forecasts we figured to have low water in 5 mile rapid so we decided to run it on Friday as opposed to Saturday when flows were supposed to be even lower.

As it turned out this didn't matter because we ran it at about as low as it got and probably would have had a bit more water on Saturday. Sunday (today) would have been great in terms of water and ease.

We spent about 6 hours working through 5 mile in these low flows and increased our experiences with ropes and pulleys and vectors to extract boats from rocks. Normally you have to pay for this kind of schooling and what you learn isn't nearly as thorough ;)

Beyond the ropes and pulleys and vectors we learned that Sotar tubes are much stickier on rocks than are Aire tubes.

We also re-confirmed what we already knew about cat frames. Cat frames for this type of boating need to have a hole under/in front of the seat so the boater can get down onto rocks and pull the boat off. Our Sotar boater also had a solid floor frame. Between his frame and his tubes it was always more difficult to deal with his boat than with any of the Aires.

In 16 foot cats and at 850 CFS 5 mile rapid is busy, but not terrible.

At 550 CFS it is much, much busier and you are going to get stuck. The harder you have to work to get unstuck, the more tired you are going to get and the more times you are likely to get stuck.

This was our basic scenario for this run through 5 mile. By the time we got through we were tired boaters indeed, but none the worse for wear ;)

If you stick to flows above 900 CFS you can avoid all of this scenario in just about any boat! ;)

As a side note about the road. Two of my long time rafting buddies were on this trip. They have heard me talk in length about this road
many times. Both said it was far worse than they had imagined.