Taylorville is accessible to a lot of people. Now rated IV by AWW. Easy to scout and walk anything.
Good place to experience creeking and slides with people to teach and help you.
There is a step up in the crowd running the Moshier. The last boof and subsequent S shaped rapid on Moshier's first section (after the lake) still remembers some of the CdB paddlers from the amount of skin and dignity left. And it's last rapid (Moshiers Falls, AWW says V now) has seen plenty of carnage and several months of recovery from the beloved and actual CdB president. You can still run what you want and walk the rest. The waterfalls and slides in the first section and the nice 2 sections would make it worthwhile in anyway.
I would run Eagle (drop/pool class V) creek before Moshiers Falls as you basically need to link hard IV/IV+ moves to make it down safely, while with Eagle being drop/pool you can enter and exit whereever you want and pick your fight.
I'd say the crowd at LaRaquette is 2 steps up from Eagle and Moshiers; you see seasoned class V paddlers there. It's not a place to check if you can paddle or not or understand what a boof is. It has 3 significant class V rapids with names like Particule Accelerator. One of them is the Tub... Innocent name for a hell of a washing machine experience if you miss your line by 10 inches. I went down La Raquette last year after an evening of drinking vodka, a serious handgover and (some will remember) a night under my umbrella... Stepping on the river, I told myself I wasn't in good shape enough to run class V... So I skipped the 3 class V... In our group, noone ran the first rapid - Colton Falls...a scary slide with delicate entry, bad rocks during the steep and long slide and worse ending with a huge hole across... Later heard that Vincent Dupont swam it that same day. After watching my buddy TJ being worked in the Tub for a few minutes and come out with less than a full paddle, I was happy about my decision to skip the class V... Even more happy when I saw Particule Accelerator; another (very) steep slide where you can't see where you are going and are typewrited a solid 10 feet in less than a sec. The rest of the river has a mix of class IV+, IV rapids making it one of the 2 best rivers I ran last year (not counting Chile). A beautiful and challenging river by any means.
It also has a walking path along its length as I recall.
Better bring a large river runner (Mamba, Diesel, Blunt, etc) or creeker to the Beaver. A creeker and additional protective equipement (elbow pads, throw rope, creeking helmet) is more than a good idea for Eagle and more so La Raquette.
Louis (in Montreal and eager for the Beaver and La Raquette)
