For the seventh and final day of our 2019 California swimming hole marathon, Cade and I went to Blue Streak on the North Fork Stanislaus River for the third year in a row. We saved it for last because we thought it would set too high of a bar for the rest of the trip if we did it too early. We made it a point on this year's trip to devote two separate days to this section of the river, so that our other goal of exploring upper Candy Rock would not take time away from Blue Streak. We
explored upper Candy Rock yesterday, so today Blue Streak would be getting our undivided attention.
To briefly recap our previous visits, Cade and I
first visited Blue Streak on the final day of our first California trip in 2017. We did it as a double excursion with Candy Rock, which is about a mile upstream on the same river. I did some low jumps of about 8-12 feet at Blue Streak, but I didn't have much jumping confidence that year, as it had been at least a decade since I had jumped off anything higher than ten feet (minus one fail circa 2014 at the Eno Quarry in Durham, NC, where I jumped out of a tree and landed wrong). Our
second visit to Blue Streak in 2018 was a little rushed, as my aborted attempt to get to upper Candy Rock earlier that day ate up a lot of time, and we didn't get to Blue Streak until late afternoon. At Blue Streak, I did the medium jump (between 15-20 feet high) next to the waterfall, which was probably the highest jump I had done in the past ten years, or maybe ever. There is a higher jump of about 25-30 feet that I thought I might be able to do after doing the medium jump twice, but it was too late in the day for me to work up to it, so we had to leave.
I had been looking forward to Blue Streak all winter, because I wanted to see if I would be able to do the high jump. I have been thinking about it all year since my last visit, even looking off the third floor balcony of my apartment complex, which is 23 feet high, and wondering if I would jump off it if there were water below. I’m really picky about what I will jump from, and I usually find something wrong with every jump over about 15 feet or so. In some places the water isn’t deep enough for my liking, some places have obstacles to avoid, some places don’t have clear enough water to scope out the depth, and some don’t have a steady launching pad. None of those things apply to the jumps at Blue Streak. They are basically natural diving boards over a broad pool of 20 foot deep water with no obstacles to avoid. The low and medium jumps are vertical rock walls that continue vertically underwater, and the high jump is a ledge, so you can drop straight down without hitting anything. That’s about as non-sketchy as you can get for a 30-foot jump, short of an Olympic diving platform. I passed up a couple of jumps of about 20 feet at
Hatchet Creek Falls and
South Yuba River earlier this week on the basis that I could jump at Blue Streak instead.
Now that the day of reckoning was finally here, I was pretty nervous. I’m not sure if I was more worried about actually doing it, or chickening out and living with that ghost for another year. I didn’t have much of an appetite this morning, and I wasn’t able to finish my hash browns at breakfast. I’m sure all the seasoned jumpers out there would be laughing that I was stressing out over jumping from 25-30 feet, but I don’t think I’ve ever jumped off anything more than 20 feet, if that.
( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )In summary, I have nothing new to add for Blue Streak, but I am relieved that I was finally able to do the high jump and get it off my mind. We saw six other people coming or going from the swimming hole, but only two of them were ever actually there when we were. I guess that’s a Labor Day weekend crowd at Blue Streak. This is actually the first time we have ever seen anyone else down there. Despite its lack of popularity (not complaining), Cade and I both feel that this one of the best swimming holes in California.
___
( Click here to see my ranking for the swimming holes we visited on this trip )I feel like our trip this year turned out better than
last year's trip, as this was the first time we were able to stick to our original plans the whole way through (save for going to Purdon Crossing in place of Emerald Pools, but that was voluntary and probably for the best). I didn’t feel like doing a lot of planning this year, so we mostly focused on tying up the loose ends from
our first trip in 2017 by visiting places that we passed over or didn’t get to on that trip, and finding new swimming holes on the
North Fork Stanislaus and
South Yuba Rivers. The only new region we ventured into was the Redding/Mt. Shasta area, but the swimming holes we visited there weren’t terribly impressive. The scenery up toward Mt. Shasta was nice, as it was more forested and mountainous than southern NorCal, but the only swimming hole we visited there (McCloud Falls) was too cold to be enjoyable. In fact, we kind of had a streak of unenjoyably cold swimming holes for the first half of the trip, which is why
Emerald Pools got pre-empted in favor of something warmer. Perhaps we will come back for Emerald Pools on a year with less snowmelt. We didn’t bother making another attempt at Yosemite this year, after trying and failing to go last year due to the Ferguson Fire, so that is another potential loose end to tie up the next time I’m in California.
After
a week of swimming holes in Tennessee and
another week of swimming holes in California, I think I’m actually swimming-holed out for a while. I might try to squeeze in one or two more back home in North Carolina if the weather stays warm into September, but I haven’t had a full (uneventful) weekend for about a month now, so I’m about ready to go into hibernation for a while.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday, Cade and I went to Camp Nine on the Stanislaus River, and today we went to our favorite California swimming hole: Blue Streak on the North Fork Stanislaus River. I’m not dedicating a separate entry to the latter, as I’ve already blogged it three times (in 2017, 2018, and 2019), so this entry is mainly about yesterday’s excursion to Camp Nine.
