Sauk River Packrafting

Leaving Darrington with Whitehorse Mountain in the background

April 5, 2020, Eric and Katie

We left town Sunday morning and drove to the Concret-Sauk Valley Road bridge. We parked in a pullout just on the other side, then loaded up the bikes and packrafts and biked back to Darrington. It was about 11 road miles but would get us about 15 river miles of paddling.

We put in at the Sauk-Prairie road bridge on the Darrington side at an established river access point. After hiding the bikes in the woods we started paddling just before noon. I was warm and dry in my drysuit and Katie was bundled up in a lot of layers.

The river was fun with frequent small rapids and longer stretches of floating. We saw two other paddlers near Darrington in individual pontoon-style rafts with oars. There was one near-flip incident near the end of our run but nobody went for a swim. We made it back to the take out around 5pm and surprisingly there were a half dozen other cars parked back at the bridge. People were cruising around on atvs and motorcycles and hanging out at the river. I hadn’t realized that was such a popular spot.

We soon packed up and drove back, picking the bikes up in Darrington along the way.