The Pigeon River Dries are the normally dewatered stretch of river upstream of the Pigeon Gorge play run. Unlike the run just downstream, the Dries are quite creeky, with all the associated hazards this entails, plus a few extras contributed by jagged rocks loosened by construction of I-40.
The Dries rarely run. The Walters Hydroelectric Project typically sends water around the Dries through a tunnel to the powerhouse at the put in for the popular run downstream. During times of very high inflows and reservoir levels, or during hydropower project maintenance, water may be released through gates on the dam. The start time, stop time, and volume of these releases are difficult or impossible to predict. The best resource is the Western NC Visuals FaceBook page where paddlers post recent photos of the low water bridge at the put in, which paddlers use to gage whether or not the Dries are runnable. The gage listed on this page is just a rough indicator that the Dries might be running. The gage includes generation (often 2000cfs), Big Creek, Dries tributaries, as well as the flows being released at the dam. So a gage reading of 3,200 cfs could correspond to a wide range of flows in the Dries, but is likely to indicate a release is occuring at the dam.
From visually estimates of 350-650 cfs in the Dries (not on the USGS gage), the Dries are class IV-IV+ with one V (No Where to Land, which features a shallow, rock-laden landing zone and a severely undercut left bank at the top of the main drop); from 650-1,500 cfs the Dries are class IV+ with two V's (No Where to Land and Chinese Arithmetic, the longest rapid on the river and the only rapid to have claimed a life). At levels over 900 cfs or so all but the two hardest drops are IV's or IV+'s, but as Tom Piccirilli said of the IV+'s, 'they're IV's, but they're 4.9999's.' In addition, a swim could be nasty as some of the rock is jagged and in places the action is continuous. The Dries have been run very very high (Tom Visnius and Corran Addison ran them at 3,000 cfs), but for mere mortals the run starts to get very pushy around 1,500 cfs.
From November 2000 to May 2001 the surge tank feeding the Walters power plant underwent repairs, and for almost this entire period the Dries ran. This meant that a run that at one time had been done by only a handful of boaters became very well known (at least at lower water levels).
Hurricane Helene significantly changed the Dries in 2024. The upper half of the run has some new rapids, some changed rapids, and some unchanged rapids. The lower half of the run has been buried beneath massive amounts of road-bed rock from the I-40 slope failures. Repair work on I-40 is expected to last until sometime between 2027 and 2030. This work will include the construction of a two-lane rock road built in the right half of the river, that will be removed as construction wraps up. A lot of rock will be harvested from the river, primarily, and hopefully only, rock that originated from I-40. Needless to say, paddling the Dries during this period would require significant caution, and NCDOT would rather paddlers avoided the Dries during this timeframe.