F orrest Noble is a lucky guy — he’s been able to do the Sickbird Loop two years in a row.
Lucky… or maybe there’s another word for it. He confesses his wife thinks he’s a little crazy.
But it doesn’t matter, because the Sickbird Loop is, well, sick.
The loop, which is actually a three-sport link-up, was conceived of by “Colorado Rivers and Creeks” guidebook author Gordon Banks.
Noble had been itching to do it. He finally caught the right conditions for the loop in 2010 — when the raptor closure on the notorious Eldorado Canyon climb, “The Naked Edge,” lifted while South Boulder Creek was runnable. Noble and a handful of hearty friends climbed the Edge, then rode bikes to the put-in at Pinecliffe, where they began paddling down toward the state park.
This past weekend, Noble was joined again by fellow Sickbird veteran Oliver Deshler; Korey Dausz joined them for the kayak section. If you want to squeeze in this sick loop in the next few days, Noble has a few suggestions:
Find crazy, talented friends
To pull this off, you have to find friends who are both slightly unhinged, good kayakers and climbers. The Edge clocks in at 5.11b, and some of the rapids, like the Class-V Gash, are deadly, Noble says.
“If you blow it, or mess it up, no one’s going to be able to rescue you, and you’re probably going to die,” he adds.
“But it’s a great rapid, it’s fun.”
Um. Wow.
Work the logistics
“We didn’t do the bike this year,” Noble said. “That’s what was killing us. There’s so many shuttle logistics that it’s insane.”
Sans bike, they dubbed it the “Sickbird Horseshoe.”
In addition to needing your bikes in Eldorado State Park post-climb, you’ll need to lose them at the put-in, and then grab kayaks and new clothes. And you’ll need transportation from the take-out off the Upper South Boulder Creek to the put-in for the Lower.
For shuttles, enlist friends who weren’t crazy enough to join you on the loop. It helps if they feed you snacks, too, and help you do number three…
Stay amped
“You have to be willing to hang it out all day long, and just be like, ‘OK, we’re going big today,'” Noble said.
Keeping the adrenaline going for the full 13- or 14-hour loop is a challenge, though.
How does Noble do it?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of power gels?”
Psyched friends help, he said.
When they’d get tired, all of a sudden, “One guy will just scream, ‘SICKBIRD!’ at the top of his lungs, and that gets you going.”
