North Fork Crystal

The North Fork Crystal is high elevation Colorado 4X4 and huck, with the emphasis on 4X4 (your Suby will not make it). The water is clean and the drops are too. We only ran the first 4 drops due to wood in the short gorge. This short section is very steep (loses about 100 feet over 4 drops) and high quality. We had about 500 cfs on the downstream Crystal gauge (about 1/3 of that is in the creek). This seemed like a nice medium-low level.

The first drop is a long, low angle slide.



There is one eddy between drops one and two. Two of us caught the eddy, one missed it. Luckily, missing the eddy sets you up fine for drop 2. This drop has a twisting entry ledge follows by a large slide falls with a kicker. This year there was a tree in the eddy river right below this drop, so you need to run it under control.





Drops 3 and 4 are smaller, with drop 4 being the cleanest ten footer in Colorado.