I was away this weekend but this is a submission that Ian Campbell had sent me where he, Laurie Brown, Andrew Devost, and Paul Hill did a first D in the 45 river area.

We Bagged a Broad (River) past Forty Five (River)

Saturday, November 10, 2007, saw the first descent (to our knowledge) of the Broad river in Fundy Park. Following our previous weekend’s journey, we continued up the road from the 45 river and found this gem.

As we put on the river, it seemed as though the day was going to be long and labouros as the river level was less than optimum. We scratched along and at times, I admit, I thought about getting out of the boat and hiking back up to the car where we put in. We stuck it out and after some shallow water and some downed trees we came to a stream dumping into our annoyingly low river. This was just enough water to make the rest of the run interesting. A short while after the two waters joined, we came upon what we appropriately named “Gateway Falls” This was a narrow 6 feet wide slot, runnable very close to the right wall. This seemed to be the Gateway to the creek below.

Following the gateway were tight lines, narrow slots and numerous boulder gardens. As done the week prior, a lot of scouting was done in the leap frog style with directions communicated from the bottom of drops. There were a few times when the drops where so close together, memorizing the sequence of boofs and angles was necessary. “ Center line, right boof followed by right line right angle, followed by center line left boof. Then you can break! Got that?”

After to so many drops to recall them all, we came upon Broad River Falls. This day it was a mandatory portage although I think it may be runnable at higher levels. This had a lead in ledge 8 feet above the real start of the drop. Then the water dropped 10 feet onto rocks and at the same time went off to the right into a boily cauldron continuing on to the left for the final 5 foot plunge. Boofing the initial drop is mandatory if you think you want to take this one on. A few more drops and boulder gardens and then we hit the confluence with the 45 to make the Upper Salmon River. Nice sequences of drops made this a great run. As heard of from the 45 trip report, the Upper Salmon was a great, quick, continuous boogie water runnout to Alma.

This was probably the lowest you’d want to run this river now and with our previous weekends info, we are starting to get a little river level correlation worked out for runnable levels for the rivers in this area. Come on to NB and grab on. If you need info on levels, give us a shout.

Monday we did a low water run on the Folly.

Cheers