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Paddling with Mike Svob Discovery and danger comes with low water paddling When my friends and I used to paddle the Rio Grande River on the Texas-Mexico border, we learned that the International Scale of Difficulty is different there. Everywhere else, the ISD has six levels for rating the relative difficulty of paddling a river, ranging from "suitable for beginners" (Class I) to "suicidal" (VI). On the Rio Grande, however, there are two additional levels. The new Level I is "no water in the river," and Level VIII is "narco-traffickers with AK-47's along the shoreline." It's a joke, of course, but there's a grain of truth in it. The river keeps getting lower and lower, for example, as farmers and communities draw increasing amounts of water for irrigation and other purposes. In our seven years of driving from Illinois to southern Texas during the Christmas/New Year's break, we paddled the river when it was both frighteningly high and super-low. Luckily, we never had any run-ins with narcos or smugglers, but we did have a tendency (perhaps foolish) to paddle a little faster and to feign casualness when we saw horseback riders with rifles atop the cliffs. We stopped making our annual trek to the Rio after reading about several incidents in which canoeists and rafters were shot at, including the killing of one, by persons unknown. The Rio isn't the only river that I've paddled when it was quite low. Indeed, anyone who has canoed and kayaked for a long time has inevitably had days when he returns home and puts away his boat with a zillion scratches that weren't there that morning. It's all a part of paddlesports, especially when you're trying out a new stream or when you want to get on the river in the dry months of July and August. I recall many such days, one of which occurred on the river that I sketched last month in Silent Sports – the Pine – when I caromed through the many boulder gardens downstream from Highway 55 in very low water. Another super scrapie day, among many, occurred in the mid-1990s when a friend and I paddled the Montreal for the first time. Even though the flow was minimal below Saxon Falls, we had a good time in the gorgeous canyon. But when the cliff walls receded, there was no way to maintain any semblance of paddling elegance in the long, shallow boulder beds that followed. Day in and day out, the best time for most people to paddle is when water levels are "medium," i.e., neither too high nor too low. But, counterintuitive though it might sound, there are actually times when it is fun to paddle when flows are meager. Back in the days when I lived on the Mackinaw River in central Illinois, for example, I often didn't have a choice in the summertime when I came home from work and wanted a couple of quick, anxiety-dispelling hours on the river. I knew I'd be scraping bottom frequently, constantly on the look-out for the "deepest" water, and occasionally needing to get out of the canoe to pull it along. At the time, I couldn't have cared less whether the river bore 1 inch or 1 foot of water. My dog Nike preferred low water. Over the years, I've been blessed with paddling buddies receptive to trying just about anything, as long as it's reasonably safe. That includes occasionally indulging our curiosity about what a river looks like when it's really low. Believe it or not, this kind of semimasochistic self-indulgence not only can be fun, but can also be quite instructive as well. You can enjoyably run a favorite drop a hundred times – say, Yellow Bridge Falls on the Pike – unaware of its underwater structure, only to be amazed when you see its rocky anatomy with almost no water flowing over it. The Vermilion at zero inches There are two such experiences that stand out in my mind. Both were a revelation. One occurred on Illinois' best whitewater stream, the Vermilion. Because it was only 90-minute drive from the Peoria area where I lived, my friends and I used to practically live on the Vermilion when the water was up. Its rapids, especially the famous Wildcat, were a perfect place to learn and hone whitewater skills and enjoy great scenery. One Saturday in August, on a lark, Roger Fandel and I tied our well-worn Perception kayaks to our vehicles and headed for the river to see whether we could paddle it when it was close to bone dry. Surprisingly, we had a great time. Using our river-reading abilities to the maximum, we always found a channel that had enough water to float our kayaks, albeit with a lot of bouncing and scratching. For the most part, the underwater structure of the river was no great surprise: most boulder gardens are fairly predictable, after all. But two locations were astonishing. Less than a mile from the put-in, for example, there is a popular spot where three big boulders form three chutes that invite playboating. Over the years, we had spent many an hour there, eddying out, ferrying, paddling back upstream and having a good time. We had heard that one of the rocks was undercut; in fact, the spot is known as Hole-in-the-Rock. But we had no idea until that day how extreme and how dangerous the undercutting is. After that day, we always adjusted our daredeviltry at Hole-in-the-Rock. The other surprise came just below the ugly and lethal low-head dam at the cement plant. Again, we were well aware of the vicious hydraulic that forms at the dam, a hazard that had claimed lives in the past. But we were astounded at another danger that lurked downstream from the dam. The low water level revealed an unbelievable quantity of rebars, corrugated steel and other debris lying on the bottom, posing an incredible threat to hapless swimmers. (I've been told that much of this debris has been cleaned up in recent years, but I'll believe it when I see it.)
Grandfather Falls Another memorable low-water day took place several years later when two of us were returning to Illinois after a weekend on the Wolf River. Both of us were history buffs with a special interest in the logging era when the Wisconsin River was a principal waterway for loggers. So we decided to take a look at Grandfather Falls a few miles north of Merrill. Most of the daunting drops that once bedeviled Wisconsin River loggers are now hidden beneath dams and flowages, but Grandfather can still be seen immediately below the dam, dewatered most of the time – almost a mile of high-gradient riverbed choked with thousands of giant boulders and rock formations. The dam diverts almost the entire flow of the river down a canal and then through two gigantic tubes (called penstocks) to a downstream powerhouse. Highway 107 runs on the east bank of the river, and from there you can access parking areas at the dam and power plant. A short, northward walk along the tubes will take you to a trail alongside the original riverbed all the way to the dam. This trail, incidentally, is part of the Ice Age Trail system. Chances are better than 100-to-1 that you'll see very little water here, but it's great to visualize what it must be like at high flow. Besides, it's a beautiful hike of only a mile or so. On the day we stopped, there was still a lot of daylight left, and we felt up to another low, low water challenge. Parking one vehicle at the dam, we carried our kayaks downstream to a point where the enormous jumble of water-polished boulders permitted us to paddle, slide, scratch and scrunch down to the powerhouse. It was another of those I'm-glad-I-did-it-but-I'd-never-do-it-again experiences, and one that I frankly don't recommend. Even at that level, this one-mile stretch (which drops 90 feet in the first 1,000 yards) was a solid Class II, and there's one big, irregular ledge that must be a Class III-IV doozey in medium to high water. Apparently, this part of the river receives water only with the heavy spring rains when repairs or maintenance are being done at the powerhouse. Whether or not you plan to abuse your boat during low water, or risk life and limb during the rare times of medium or high water, I recommend that you take the time to check out this incredible place from the shoreline trail. It definitely rates a "Wow!" For more information For maps and other information on the Vermilion and Wisconsin River, see my books Paddling Illinois, pages 106-107, and Paddling Northern Wisconsin, pages 160-165. There are excellent websites on the Vermilion: www.rivers-end.org/vermilion/index.html, http://wpr.pair.com/vermilion and http://paddleguides.com/rivers/midwest. For descriptions and photos of Grandfather Falls, go to http://paddleguides.com/rivers/midwest and www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River. There is a map of the Grandfather Falls segment of the Ice Age Trail at www.co.lincoln.wi/us/forms_ _documents/?c=ice_age_trail. Mike Svob is a native Illinoisan and long-time northwoods devotee. He has canoed and kayaked for more than 30 years in 18 states and several foreign countries but regards Wisconsin as paddling paradise and home. He now spends a majority of the year in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of Paddling Illinois, Paddling Northern Wisconsin and Paddling Southern Wisconsin, all published by Trails Books.
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