Surfing and Swimming the Lower West River (R2)

Surfing and Swimming the West River from Mountain Visions on Vimeo.
I've become quite adept at finding gentle keeper hydraulics. This benign hole spiced up the lower West River a bit during the first day of 2016 West Fest in Jamaica, Vermont and sent me for a much needed swim. The lower section, between Jamaica State Park and the Route 100 bridge, is pretty tame in a raft, but we wanted to get our dog out and decided to run the lower section with him. One of the main reasons we got the raft was so we could bring him along and the cool thing about whitewater is you don't need class IV water to practice class IV moves. On day two we ran the upper section, which is somewhat technical class III. Although we had no problems with it, I'd be hesitant to bring the dog due to the potential for some technical swims, especially through the Dumplings.