South Ram

The South Ram is an awesome 2-4+ 2 day section of river, 50-60KM's in length located just outside Rocky Mountain House on Hwy 752. An unlikely spot for such a gem considering you can see for miles in every direction on the drive up. Friday night started with meeting the group, Mikkel being the only one I had paddled with before.

Unfortunately the logging road that allows for a simple take out only metres form the river bank was locked with the most heavy set logging road gate I have ever seen in Canada. No bribing the locals with a few beers to get into this one. So we continued another 7KM down stream and parked a couple of cars there.

Having run shuttle that night we were ready to go early the next morning and set on our way for what was my first time down the Ram or any river in Alberta for that matter. This river produces some nice challenging grade four rapids in between truely beautiful canyons and mamonth cliff walls. In the weeks previous to out decent the river had flash flood from 40cms up to 700.

Dave Crerar Table Top Falls credit: Mikkel St Jean Duncan

This meant that the erosion was clearly visable and the drift wood was left stranded 30-40 feet above the water level at some points. the first day had most of the challenging white water, with a nice 3 ledge section followed by an 80 footer that we rapelled around, which was then followed by table rock falls, a 40 foot water fall with an interesting lead in. Our final rapid of the first day was a small 50ft slide which took us to our campsite.