River Mile: 120-right
Time: 20 Minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Wet or Dry?:Dry. Two careful scrambles around small pools will keep your feet dry.
Ideal Weather: Any
Potential: A dedicated hiker could scramble through the Tapeats at the mouth of Blacktail and walk the open creekbed of upper Blacktail for a few miles before getting cliffed out.
From the beach and big eddy just downstream from Blacktail, hike across the alluvium and enter the creekbed near the river. Head upstream from here along the trickle of clear water that usually dribbles out of the gorge. There are two pools in the creekbed that require either a knee-deep wade or a short scramble to avoid. A chokestone about 0.2 miles up will stop most of us. Sometimes there is a deep pool at the base of this chokestone; other times flash floods fill in the pool with gravel.
If you make the slimy climb beyond the chokestone, you’ll find more narrows. It is hardly worth the effort, though; the canyon terminates soon after with another fall.