Hautes Alpes

Ubaye's Lower Gorge

For those of you that didn't already know it, the Durance valley is one of France’s paddling meccas.

First of all, the valley and surrounds have over ten great rivers or creeks, with difficulty ranging from II to V+ to suit everyone (there’s even flatwater if that’s what you’re after).

Second, many of the rivers being fed by glaciers, there is water year-round, except maybe winter but then you’ve got skiing, so that’s all good.

Third, the Durance has everything a paddler could desire: a nice slalom course at L’Argentière-La Bessée, another one at Saint-Clément-sur-Durance, paddling shops alongside it, easy access, a mythic wave/hole called Le Rabioux to play all day (and all night, as it is lit up), another nice wave a bit further down at Embrun. Even if it wasn’t for the other rivers feeding into it, the Durance would still be worth a trip in itself. But then you also have all the side rivers: the Gyr, Guisane, Clarée, Ubaye, Guil, etc… Plus rock climbing, paragliding, walking, mountaineering… What more could you ask for?

Aline at L'Argentière-la-Bessée

This summer, I had the chance to go paddling there with a group of great kids from my local paddling club. We spent eight days there and everyone had a blast.

Céline: "What are you guys doing???"

We spent our first day driving there and getting things organised: setting up camp, grocery shopping, etc...

Our camp for the week

On the second day we warmed up on the Durance, from L’Argentière to Saint-Clément-sur-Durance. Nothing exciting really, but good to get used to my “new” boat. As mine had broken a few weeks earlier, I had to borrow the club’s old Whip-it. The makers reckon it’s a good boat to cartwheel but with a length of 2,72 metres and 257 litres of volume, I didn’t find it particularly easy (read: impossible) as I only weigh about 62 kilos. The fact that I had to stuff the front of the boat with heavy-duty plastic bags (found in the campground’s bins) to make footblocks also didn’t help.

"The tapered ends, balanced weight distribution, flat bottom and crisprails carve into eddies with panache ... surf waves, spin on the green, cartwheel and go vertical."

Third day was also on the Durance but slightly more exciting as we paddled the Rabioux section. Our group made it through without a hitch. Some of us played in the feature for a bit but as it is quite a fast and powerful piece of water, there was some gear carnage. Lucien bent his paddle that then snapped in half when we tried to straighten it! Here's a link to some footage that will give you a fair idea of what I'm talking about (not actually us, unfortunately): http://x.yak.free.fr/rabioux.WMV

We got cold so came out and had lunch on the banks, watching groups of paddlers coming down. As this is the busiest section of one of the busiest French rivers, there was quite a bit of fun to be had. Every two or three minutes, a group would come through and get upended in the hole. The interesting thing was to try and pick who would be able to get through and why and also who would roll up and who would swim and why. Bulky bloke with Strutter helmet paddling a Vibe: roll up! Tall, lanky dude with fluorescent wetsuit paddling a Corsica: Swim! Tourists paddling an inflatable and going in sideways: Swim! Interestingly, the ones that ended up swimming seemed to have just as much, if not more, fun than the ones rolling up. Great to decrease the fear of swimming!

Whenever there wasn’t a group coming down, playboaters would take over the show and show off their moves, or rafters would go in to see how many paddlers they could lose in one go. Very, very enjoyable indeed!

Then down to the wave of La Clapière, in Embrun, where we had the pleasure to share the eddy with frenchies that had clearly never heard of silly concepts such as queuing, courtesy and not trying to get on the wave when somebody is already on it.

It rained on the fourth day so we thought we’d give the Gyronde a go. Good thing was the Gyronde flows right past the campsite we were staying at. The river was in minor flood and running fairly fast, which resulted in some of the kids having a peak adventure ride.

Then we did it again with the more confident paddlers and started higher up with some nice grade IV rapids. As almost everywhere around here, the scenery was gorgeous, with craggy peaks acting as background.

The Ubaye

On the fifth day we decided to run the Guisane. It started as an easy, if a little bit boney run, but soon transformed into a great little paddle down numerous boulder gardens. Most of the fun stuff was down a nice little gorge, its banks lined with Pine trees. Lovely!

Luca: cool, calm and collected

Day six would be a big one. We would first run one of the bottom sections of the Ubaye river all together and then run the harder bottom section with the more confident paddlers. First part of the run was fun, if a little bit crowded as the Ubaye is regarded as one of the best rivers around.

A mini gorge on the Ubaye. Told you it was picturesque!

We then had lunch just before the entrance of the dreaded gorge. I say “dreaded” because it was graded VI in our somewhat outdated guidebook, but that was years ago and at a higher water level.

Always a smile on her face: Rachel dodging boulders

A paddler asked us if we knew what we were in for, seemingly concerned about our ability and trying to dissuade us from going any further. I guess you could take it against you and get offended (“Do I look like a tool?” kind of thing) but I thought it was nice to see someone cared about our well-being!

A tricky little drop not far from the start

As Céline wasn’t coming with us she agreed to lend me her boat, so I swapped my outdated Whip-it for her creeky Zulu. Wow, what a change!

We set out down the gorge and past a picturesque waterfall. 300 metres further down was the first major rapid. Graded IV-V, this looked quite serious: steep, boulder choked, long and technical, with a lot of moves to get right. I decided to portage it for two reasons a) I’d only had about 300 metres to get used to the boat and, having never paddled a proper creek boat before, didn’t know how much easier it was compared to a playboat and, b) let’s face it: I was just plain scared!

In retrospect, I could probably have run it but it's always easy to say that afterwards, isn'it?

Always in control: Ludo after running the drop pictured above

So I portaged the first two rapids, the hardest. Some of our crew ran them all, including the ever-confident Raphaël who juuuust made it in his playboat (S6x). Ludo and Olivia also ran the thing in full.

An unknown gumby (me, actually)

We scouted the next rapids but the rest of the descent got easier as we went down so we ended up boat-scouting and madly bombing through the rest of the gorge.

Ludo thought he'd give the shortcut a go...

...and got a free mud bath for trying!

Day 7. As we hadn’t had a proper rest day yet, we thought we’d take it easy towards the end. So we went climbing in the morning and had a nice session at the slalom course of L’Argentière in the afternoon.

Noémie styling it up as usual

The siamese brothers: Loïc and Lucien

On the way back to camp, we realised this would be our last chance to do the Gyr, which we’d talked about doing all week. So we quickly unloaded the slalom boats, forced a slice of cake down our throats and jumped back on the bus. We’d already started driving away before someone wisely remarked: “Did we even check we’ve got enough suitable boats?”

So I jumped on the brakes and we jumped out, had a two-second look at the trailer, guesstimated we had roughly enough boats and were on our way. A bit further on, Ludo parked his van on a side of a river that we thought was the Gyr, only to realize, a little bit further down the road when we crossed the actual Gyr, that it wasn’t! We hesitated for a second but time was running out (being snowmelt, the river stops running almost as soon as the sun goes down), so we thought “Ah, f**k it! We’ll deal with it later.” and kept on driving to the put-in. Everyone madly rushing to get organized, we quickly realized there wasn’t quite enough suitable boats. “Oh well, I’ll take this one, she’ll be right!”

We all went for fairly fast boats in order to punch through stoppers more easily, except for Raphaël who, as usual, sensibly opted for his seriously tiny playboat (a Pyrhana S6x, 1.85 meters long). In his defence, all we’d seen of the Gyr so far looked quite benign and we were starting to wonder if the guidebooks and locals we’d quizzed weren’t talking it up heaps. We wouldn’t be disappointed.

Raphaël showed us a neat little trick called levitation

We put in and started paddling down a fast but straightforward gravel race, wondering if we were on the right river, but soon hit the real stuff.

Now, strictly technically speaking the Gyr isn’t that hard. What makes it hard is that it’s very fast and very, very sustained. Way more so that anything I’ve paddled so far. The top section is only 3 kms long but there is only one decent eddy the whole way! So for the rest of the time we had to paddle upstream towards the bank-where the flow was only marginally slower-and desperately cling onto roots/stones/people’s boats to look at the next rapid. More often than not, we just couldn’t stop, or the stone we were holding on to would start sliding, so we’d take a deep breath, pray there wasn’t a strainer around the next bend and paddle hard.

To add to the excitement (not really needed, but that’s just the way it is), the Gyr is also the coldest river I know. In fact the hotter the day, the colder the water (as it melts more and hence runs off faster when temperature is high). And when I mean cold, I mean not much above freezing: 2-3 degrees max.

Icing on the cake is the riverbed: shallow and paved with sharp, pointy rocks just waiting to give you a vigorous, all-over body massage in the event of a swim. My advice: don’t.

That said we had an absolute blast! I was peaking big time the whole way! The run is so continuous and fast that, at one stage, I didn’t even have time to blink the water off my eyes before I’d hit the next hole. One wicked, fast-paced, rollercoaster ride!

In order to shorten our walk back to the van, we decided to paddle down past the usual take out.

This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as the river was running along a fence all the way to a recirculating weir. So we got out and bushbashed all the way back up to the normal take out. Shortcuts definitely make for long detours.

Then Ludo and I set out on a lovely evening walk in search of his van, which we manage to find without getting lost even once.

As this was our last evening, we also treated ourselves to some nice pizza. It just doesn't get much better than this!

Once again a wicked trip. Thanks to all present for making that week a memorable one!

The End

All photos courtesy of Roger Haederli (Merci Roger!)