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Pilchuck River: Machias to Snohomish

At 880cfs this is a pushy class II-. Too fast for good practice. Below 700cfs would expose more rocks and make easier practice.

Tom Unger Tom Unger
March 31, 2025
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • Pilchuck park has parking, bathrooms, and a good gravel beach at the river.

    Ok Mill Bridge has parking for about 6 cars.  A short trail the river where there is a good launch site into an eddy.  

On March 29th we ran the whitewater field trip 2 - paddling skills - on the Pilchuck because the Green was running above 3,000cfs.  I checked the put-in before driving to our meeting at Pilchuck park.  I saw the river was flowing fast - too fast for much ability to focus on paddling skills.  Therefor, I decided to take the group to a lake first.  

Hill Park at Blackman's Lake:  looked like a good site, except the lake was closed for environmental remediation.

Sun Beach Park on Lake Stevens.  Parking for 8-10 cars.  Port-a-poty.  Good water access.  Shoreline has firm bottom for activities where a coach can stand in the water.  Practice here worked very well.

At the put-in there was a fast flowing current with eddies on both sides.  We were able paddle a figure 8 route to practice entering an leaving currents.  This worked until 2 people capsized.  They swam to shore but their boats escaped down stream.  

Within the first mile, there were multiple rocks or shore features at which we could practice eddying out.  However, it was common for students to miss the eddy then find the current too strong to make it back up.  In general, the current was too strong to hang out at any one site and make multiple attempts to catch a feature.  

I had 4 waypoints for reported river-spanning logs.  We encountered only 1 significantly hazardous log jam about 1 mile from the launch.  This required students to ferry across the river to make the clear passage on the inside of the bend.  Missing this meant getting swept in to the logs.  There were no good portages either side.  All succeed.  No other river spanning.  We portaged one more log hazard out of caution.  

Lower down we did boat bumping practice, going across and back.  Only 2 students were able to get boats across and back.  Most others made it half way and were coached to return.  Those that made it 75% of the way were not able to return to our gravel bar and ended up a couple hundred feet downstream with a boat.  We had boat owners swim 

In general, the river flow was too fast for good practice.  This made eddies harder to catch.  Once missed, people were swept down stream.  There were limited features and we could not make good use of them.  

However, people did get good experience paddling a fast moving river