Dinkey Creek is between Kings Canyon and Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada. I first started exploring Dinkey Creek in a kayak. In 1985 a friend and I kayaked a short low elevation section near Balch Camp at the confluence with the North Fork Kings river. The following year or so several of us paddled a section up at 5,000 foot elevation, from the Dinkey Creek campgrounds down for 5 miles or so. It was great fun and got me thinking that just about anything might be possible.
Looking at topos I found that the section below Ross Crossing dropped 1200 feet in one mile and around 400 feet in the mile after that. I started dreaming that I might be able to bag the worlds steepest kayak run. Having more than a little trepidation though, I decided to canyoneer the section first.
Barry Chambers and I hiked from near Balch Camp, upstream a ways and back one day to get a feel for some of the terrain. We enjoyed the beautiful pools and waterfalls. Much of it looked kayakable as well. So, a few weeks later we set off from Ross Crossing prepared to take two or more days to go the 7 – 8 miles to Balch Camp. We carried two 150′ ropes and a bolt kit.
Dinkey, despite its name is a good sized creek, draining peaks up to 10,000 feet high. It can be flowing from several hundred cfs to over a thousand cfs through memorial weekend. The flow drops quickly through the summer, though, till it is only a trickle in August and September. (Realtime flow information is available for Dinkey and many other rivers on www.dreamflows.com )
Dinkey is quite pleasant for several hundred yards below Ross Crossing. There is a nice camping spot, big pools for fishing or swimming, and it would even make decent kayaking. Kind of boring for canyoneering though. At least for the first few hundred yards. Ah, what we suffer through!
Then there appeared steep rock walls to make us work a bit. A nice jump that was hard to tell if it was clean. One of us lowered down to check it out so the second could jump into a clean landing. There were some small potholes with underwater tunnels to swim through, and it seemed that it was getting just a bit more interesting as we progressed. Then the canyon started to open up.
There was a horizon line ahead of us and we could see the mountain a mile or so across the valley. As we came up to the horizon line, there appeared a short drop and another horizon line below us, giving pretty much the same view, but with a bit more of the mountain ahead of us.
At this place, Dinkey drops through the joint of two large rounded walls or domes. The walls smoothly curve in and meet to form a V trench. But with large serrations. The trench would be level with shin deep water till it dropped 10 or 12 feet into the next level trench. The walls were smooth and just steep enough as to be unclimbable. We lowered the first person who then spotted as the second downclimbed and slid. For myself, I tried to downclimb or hang low enough so that I built up minimal speed before Barry could stop me from breaking my ankle. It was awkward. The weird thing was that the view did not change.
It seemed that at each lip all we could see was the next lip and the mountain across the valley. I thought that each drop had to be a bit steeper than the last for this to be. I figured that if it continued, eventually we would be completely upside down!
Before we got too close to that angle, we came to a clump of huge chockstones plugging the crack. We swam underneath the first one for 30 feet or so. There was just enough air space for our heads so we could laugh hysterically.
Then the water leaked away underneath the boulders and we climbed up on the biggest one. Now this was a weird spot. It was a big boulder; flattish and comfortable on top, but rounding steeper to a lip. It was too steep to walk out and see over the lip. All we could see was that blasted mountain across the valley!
It was clear that we would have to drill a bolt and rap, but we could not tell where the best spot would be since we could not see the landing. We scoured the area looking for an anchor for our ropes so that we could see over the edge and best determine where to drill. There were no other anchors. We picked a spot to drill on faith.
Sometimes faith is rewarded. When the anchor was finished and I rapped out to the lip of the boulder, I saw the end of my rope tickling the streambed straight below. Down I went. Below the lip I was hanging free in space. Forty feet down the water reappeared from underneath the boulder to also drop straight down, but 20 feet away from me. Â
At the bottom we swam a short ways to a room cut into the side of the wall. Seems like it was about 10 or 15 feet in diameter. There was a flat ledge that we could walk on, just above the water, and extending most of the way around. Alcoves and undercuts are beautiful in sandstone and limestone, but to find one in granite means that water is kicking ass!
Seems like there was steep open hiking/downclimbing over flattish (side to side) slabs for a ways. We spent the night on a huge ledge festooned with survey markers for a prospective powerhouse. It has not been built yet and might not ever be built, but the stakes might still be there.
The next day we bypassed a most interesting section in order to make time and stay warm till the sun hit us. Once passed Ross Creek, the gradient is much less and we swam, walked, jumped, downclimbed, and rock hopped our way down towards Balch Camp.
We placed no more bolts and made it out that day. Technically, this lower section was much easier than the stuff above, but walking and swimming in a rocky streambed is very tiring. There were a number of clean jumps, mostly in the 20 foot range, but one was 40 or 50 foot.
I came away with from this trip with too few pictures, a nasty hemotoma on my shin, and a conviction that Dinkey might be kayakable from Ross Creek down, though not from Ross Crossing down. We also found a camp at the confluence of Ross Creek, so I figured there had to be some sort of trail to that point also.
The trail showed up on forest service aerial photographs and once the memory of the difficulties of the creek had sufficiently faded, I talked my friend Phil Martin into attempting to kayak Dinkey from Ross Creek to Balch Camp. Two other fellows said they would come but wisely changed their minds at the trailhead.
Suffice it to say, canyoneering with 150 cfs flow and while carrying a kayak on your shoulder is a lot of hard work! The kayaking was spectacular when we could do it, and we were able to do more and more of it as we progressed, but the first mile and a half ate up a day. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but intimidation is a powerful force. Since I had assured Phil that it would only take a day to go through, we spent a cold, hungry night underneath a boulder. We piled leaves over ourselves to keep warm. Pity it was too dark to really see anything and we were in major poison oak country.
The next day we were so tired that we alternated scouting the major drops. The person not scouting would stay in the kayak and sleep.
This year (2002) several groups of kayakers reportedly descended Dinkey from Ross Creek to Balch Camp again. They probably did it in much better style than I, but I am not sure. None of them seem to be talking to me.
Paul Martzen Fresno, California