Our campmate on the last night of the Dean River trip
Dean River quick beta
We had 7.3 cms (cubic meters per second) when we launched and 5.3 cms 5 days later when we took off. This water level was doable, but below optimal. More water would definitely be better. I would aim for 10-15 cms on the Dean River Gauge at Tanswanket to start the trip. The gauge is located upstream of Boy Lake, where we started the trip. For those of you living in the USA, 1 cms is equal to 35.3147 cfs (cubic foot per second).
We did 4 nights, 5 days, but I would recommend 3 nights and 4 days. It’s a beautiful area to spend time in, but the bugs are horrendous–biting gnats, horse flies, mosquitos–so it’s not really ideal for camp lounging!
From Boy Lake, it’s 72 miles to the Dean Channel.
We flew into Boy Lake and out of Kimsquit with Tweedsmuir Air who are based at Nimpo Lake, which is the headwaters of the Dean. Some folks fly into Sigutlat Lake and paddle the Iltasyuko River to the confluence with the Dean, but this is a more expensive flight. The cheapest option would be to drive downstream as far as possible from Nimpo Lake and put in on the Dean River at the end of the road. This will add 1 full day of swamp-land paddling to your trip.
Don scouting late in the evening on day 2, which is the best whitewater day
Now, the story:
Summer, 2024. Our trip to British Columbia had been awesome so far, but we were in a bit of a holding pattern due to water levels (some rivers were too high, others too low). We were sitting at Greg’s house in Terrace, BC when I remembered that, long ago, the Dean River had been on my radar after Shayne Vollmers told me about it over a decade earlier. The Dean River begins on top of the Chilcotin Plateau in central British Columbia. It cuts quickly through the Southern Coast Range and ends less than 100 miles later in the salt water of the Dean Channel (more or less the ocean).
Information was limited. The only write up I could find was from a group who had done it at high water, 40 cms on the Dean River Gauge at Tanswanket. This is much higher than most other descents (most had been done between 5 and 8 cms) and, from the write up on Oregon Kayaking, 40 cms sounded pretty terrifying.
Flight into Boy Lake
Up in Terrace, we were running out of options and so, on a whim, I checked the level of the Dean. It was 8 cms. I sent some messages to others I knew who had done the run and they reported having water levels of 6-7 cms. So we started driving south as we tried to figure out the logistics for this run.
We ended up flying into Boy Lake with Tweedsmuir Air. This was a bit tricky to figure out as Boy Lake doesn’t show up on most maps. From some great descriptions of the shape of the lake by the Tweedsmuir Air folks I was able to find it on Guru Maps, and luckily the pilot knew where it was.
Day 1: Afternoon flight into Boy Lake. By the time we launched, two days after coming up with the plan, the river was down to 7.3 cms. We got dropped off at the lake and paddled out a little connector stream (that Don named “Boy Creek”) that lead to the Dean River. We paddled for about one and a half hours of flatwater and then came to a huge unrunnable cascade. After portaging this rapid, we started looking for camp. IMPORTANT NOTE: For the first 2 days of the Dean, camping spots are incredibly sparse. There are no beaches and not much flat ground in the upper part of this river. We ended up paddling another hour or so after we started looking for camp as there was nowhere flat to sleep. In this time we ran some smaller rapids, with just one more complicated rapid. We finally settled on a little patch of grass across from a Beaver dam full of beavers who were clearly annoyed that we were there. We paddled 7.5 miles from Boy Lake this day.
Typical ledge drop early on Day 2 on the Dean above the confluence with the Iltasyuko.
Day 2: This was the highlight of the trip, a full 9-hour day of fun and interesting Class IV and V whitewater. There were too many rapids to count and the character of the river was strange and unlike anything I’ve seen before. The canyon walls look like a crazy mixture of Devils Tower and Yosemite as basalt merges with granite in a unique river landscape. Early on day 2 while we were still on the Dean River above the confluence with the Iltasyuko we portaged one more big sloping waterfall that would have definitely gone (and been super fun) if we had more water. Then we ran a few small, fun ledge drops. We had one portage that will probably always be a portage on the Dean River just above the confluence with the Iltasyuko River. It was a sieve-filled series of cascades that I can’t imagine ever looking fun to run. We portaged on river right and had to hike up and around the short canyon. After the Iltasyuko confluence, you double your water level and the rapids get a lot better. There were rapids ranging from boulder gardens to 10-15 foot waterfalls with spicy lead-ins. I would say no mandatory portages below the Iltasyuko confluence, but we did portage a few that would probably be much better with more water. Plenty of rapids were worth scouting. The Dean has a lot of sieves and undercuts and most people will probably opt to portage a handful of rapids on this second day, though when we were there, they were all technically runnable. We had wanted to stop a bit earlier in the day, but the absolute lack of suitable camp spots kept us going. After nine hours (but only 13 miles) we found a tiny beach that we could camp on.
Day 2 has the best rapids!
Day 2 rapid
Day 3: After a bit of boogie water in the morning we arrived at Salmon House Falls which was rumored to be an “must-run 30-foot waterfall.” The reality is that it was probably around 15-18 feet tall and could have been easily portaged. I ran it, eddied out on the right, and walked back up to the top to talk to Don and take photos. After the falls, there were a few other rapids before things really mellowed out. We realized we were going too fast and were going to get to the take out a full day ahead of our float plane, so we had to slow down. After the confluence with Takia Creek, which comes in on river left, big beaches started to appear, so we did a short day time-wise and camped early to kill time. This was a mistake as we got absolutely annihilated by biting gnats. We paddled 17 miles this day.
Salmon House Falls, day 3.
Northern Lights
Day 4: Driven crazy by the biting gnats the day before, we paddled 30 miles all the way through the final canyon of the Dean. The first 25 miles were mellow, interspersed with sections of fun Class III and IV. The scenery was totally stunning as we were surrounded by the high, glaciated peaks of the Coast Range. The final canyon is marked by an old bridge abutment and a trail leading to a river guardian house on river right. We had been seeing fishermen all day who kept warning us about this canyon! We got out on river right and went to ask the guardian if we could use her wifi to get in touch with Tweedsmuir Air to move up our pick time.
For folks who want nothing to do with the canyon, there is a dirt road on river right you can portage on, but it is LONG as it goes around the backside of a small mountain that makes the river right side of the canyon. The canyon itself was super nasty at our low water level and was full of sieves and logs, but we choose to deal with it all at river level which felt like a good choice. One cool thing about it was that salmon were spawning and trying to get up the falls and the eddies in the canyon were absolutely full of fish. It was hard putting back in without launching onto a bunch of salmon. In the canyon itself, there are 5 drops (although drops 3 and 4 pretty much ran together without a sure way to stop between them). Drops 1-4 are the most consequential and drop 5 is easy. Don ran 2 rapids and I only ran one, but it was a beautiful canyon to be at the bottom of, and I think, even with a lot more water, you could deal with it at river level. It was definitely hard work portaging up and over big boulders, but it wasn’t anything too epic. We camped at an established fisherman camp just after the canyon open up and shared our beach with a young bear who busied himself with the job of fishing.
Day 5: It was an easy 5 mile paddle out to the Dean Channel the next morning. Then we had about 1 mile to paddle up the Dean Channel to Kimsquit where our float plane was going to meet us to fly out. We saw another Grizzly, this time a momma with 2 cubs.
Don arriving at the Dean Channel
Flight out from Kimsquit
The Dean is a “weird,” off-the-beaten path run that not many people do; but the combination of amazing wildlife, fun whitewater, incredible scenery, and the chance to paddle through the BC coastal range makes this run a top memory of 2024 for me.
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