Landslide on Money Drop: Rock Creek, WA

Money Drop was an 80 foot falls before a huge ever-changing landslide filled in the creek and the base of the waterfall. Right now it's around 40 feet and it's definitely still changing. Jim Busse, Luke Spencer, Chuck Taylor, Johnnie Ott and I witnessed, and a few of us narrowly escaped, part of the landslide falling into the river.

Notice the huge landslide that's taken out a bunch of trees.


Jim Busse stomping it!


Johnnie Ott's sequence.


This drop has a fast slide leading into it and it launches you with some good speed - so fun! After the falls you paddle through a tight canyon for a couple hundred yards at the end of which were eddies on both sides. The takeout was on the right and missing this eddy meant making a move boofing a log and then going into some log-choked sketchy stuff. One of our party missed the eddy and wedged his paddle across the log-move drop and I ran like hell along the shore catching the bow of his boat before he went paddle-less into the log mank.

The landslide on the left with the manky log-choked washout on the right.


Luke getting ready to go deep.


Me enjoying weightlessness.


Seconds after my second lap of the falls, the whole side of the river started sliding in. I was in the left eddy and noticed that the eddies had changed. Johnnie was running safety on a rock in the takeout eddy on the right and yelled to me to get over - at this point I had no idea what was going on. The takeout eddy became moving water so Johnnie and Chuck helped grab my boat while I got out. They passed the boat up the cliff and we scrambled up as fast as we could away from the landslide and the rising water. We watched the whole wall of clay-mud slowly slide into the river and into the eddy where I had been sitting seconds before. The rock Johnnie was standing on was submerged and Luke's throw rope got eaten by the rising water.

The dirt on the left is where the left eddy was.
The submerged rock on the right is where Johnnie was standing.


That's a lot of mud!!


Watch for signs of landslides including but not limited to:

Looming walls of loose sliding mud with downed trees packed in it.
Burned down houses.
Caution tape.