Yuletide Paddle

Huron River, Argo Park to Gallup Park

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

23 December 2019

Ellen and I and our paddling pal Doug took advantage of some springlike December weather to sneak in a quick holiday paddle.  It was so unseasonably warm out that many people were down by the river while I waited for Ellen and Doug to get back from staging the cars.  One woman asked me what we do when we encounter ice. I won’t lie;  I pooh-poohed her and was like, “Lady, it’s almost 50 out!  There’s no ice on the river!”

Yeah, so that wasn’t true.  Ellen and Doug returned to report that we’d have to break up some ice at the take-out point, in a sorta pond-like area. (Doug was, to be honest, quite excited about this.)  But surely we wouldn’t encounter any ice on the way to the pond, on the pretty swiftly moving river!

Yeah, so that wasn’t true either. The river’s shaded edge had a crust of ice, and also, at one point pretty early on, Doug was like, “Is that a body or chunk of ice?” It was the latter, but about the size and shape of a raccoon. It was relieving it wasn’t a raccoon, but also unsettling to encounter a chunk of ice that big.  Where’d it come from?

Just paddling into the start of the pond at Gallup Park, we met another kayaker coming the other way. “I had to break through some ice to get in,” he said. And indeed we paddled on to find ducks and geese chillaxin’ on thick sheets of ice mid-pond.  Ellen and Doug found a way around and I followed, not as excited about the ice as those two (cf. The Titanic), but even I found some thin ice and ripped my boat through it. Kinda fun! Getting out of our boats was a little tricky with detached ice sheets knocking together all around us, but Doug pulled me all the way onto shore.

Breaking Away

Huron River, Hudson Mills Metropark to Delhi Metropark

14 October 2019

It was fall break at work last week, and we took advantage of a few days away from school to play outside. Our friend Doug came along for one of our favorite floats: from Hudson Mills Metropark, through the town of Dexter, and on to Delhi Metropark, a trip of about 9 miles. The water at the start of the trip was running fast, and Doug and Gina safely launched:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Food is important to paddling, and we usually plan a lunch. The hardest part of a float is finding the right kind of place for the lunch, especially around here. We love our home river, but it can leave you without a lot of bank for stopping, standing, or eating. We’ve eaten on rocky islands in the river, crowded by Canada geese; or on muddy logs along skinny shores or backwaters; we all have a memory of once finding a picnic table to eat at, but none of the three of us can be sure it really happened. So, on this trip, we weren’t in our boats fifteen minutes before we pulled back out for lunch, because there was a decent lunch spot, with a real table!

The rest of the float was a delight: it’s fall now, and the river is showing out. We also floated past some new construction on the Border-to-Border trail just below Dexter Metropark. Some day soon, the river will be closed for a moment as they position the new trail bridges, but not this day!

 

A Quick One before Classes Start

Huron River, between the train bridges around Honey Creek

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

28 August 2019

The nights have been so lovely and cool lately that we decided to slip in a quick twilight paddle before back-to-school, and we picked the perfect night to do it.  Barely any wind, the air thick with dragonflies, an adolescent blue heron trying out his new fishing equipment, dramatic clouds, cool darkness.  Why does summer ever have to end?  Oh, right: it’s the only way to get to fall!

A Long, Hot One

Huron River, Lower Huron Metropark to Willow Metropark

21 August 2019

This 10 1/2 mile paddle, which we used to consider the “short” version of a longer paddle that goes another 5+ miles before we take out, kicked the butts of Ellen and me and our friend Doug, who are sorta out of paddling shape. (Also, to be fair, we went in thinking it was a 8 1/2 mile paddle.) It was also an uncommonly hot day, and while we started out commenting on how lovely it was that the skinny river’s canopy of trees provided us a nice shady path, by the end of our trip the river was wide and the sun blazed down on us, hot. 

So we ended the trip hot and tired, but happy because almost any day on the river is a good day.  We saw at least one osprey, some green herons, a ton of blue herons who seemed to feel like we were chasing them downriver, kingfishers aplenty, lots of fish, and nary another paddler.  We did see a guy with a strange, apparently gun powder-powered slingshot-type thing that shot logs in the river for his dogs to retrieve. That was a new one.

Oh! I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our lunch spot. Notoriously, on this trip, we can’t find a good place to eat lunch. The places with tables all come too early or too late, and many many places in between that look good would require us to land our boats on steep ledges and scramble up mini-cliffs to get to flat land.  Doug spied a nice logpile that was a little mucky, but whatever: we ate lunch like river wildlife, perched on a wet log.  And I have to tell you: anything you eat while perched on a wet log is good eatin’.

I want to send a special shout-out to Doug’s dad, one of the best readers of this blog!  Happy end-of-summer to you!

 

Paddling with a Ghost

Huron River, Argo Park to Gallup Park

12 August 2019

Back for the second paddle in less than a week, a good sign for my rehabilitating arm!  This one was just a short paddle in town, but we did it in the early morning and had the river mostly to ourselves–except for maybe a ghost? I’m sure you can’t miss the white orb visible in this photo–and it may have just been a speck of dust or a drop of water on my camera, but the river’s alive with stuff you can’t see but can surely feel.  Me personally, I’d be honored to be a ghost on the river someday.

Back in the Kayak Seat

Huron River, Hudson Mills to Dexter Metropark

4 August 2019

In May I had a surgical procedure on my arm, one that left me unable to do a lot of things for a while: I couldn’t write or type, prep dinner or clean up, pick up my cats, mow the lawn–so, life/work stuff, but then I also couldn’t climb (that’s how I hurt myself), road or mountain bike, or paddle. Slowly I’ve been getting permission from my PT to reactivate–and today marked my return to the river! Ellen (who endured my river exile with me) and I did 6 miles on the Huron, probably a little long for my first time back at it, but the river was high for August and pushed us right along, and I don’t seem to be any worse for the wear. Fingers crossed!

Back at It

Huron River, Island Lake State Park to Placeway Picnic Area

10 June 2018

It’s taken us a long time to get out paddling this year; the weather, our work, and the height of the river conspired to keep us away until this morning, when we went for a quick trip on the Huron. Starting out from the Kensington Lake Dam in Island Lake SRA, we floated down to Placeway picnic area, a trip of a little more than four miles. In that time, we saw a thousand swallows, probably a half-dozen herons, and one very busy osprey working the river, and a swimming chipmunk. The water was calm, the air was cool, and it starting misting just before we landed—a perfect summer morning.

Deer Growling?

Huron River, Argo Park to Gallup Park

31 May 2017

The river was fat this morning–in lots of places, the banks were under water on either side, and our put-in spot was under water too–but it was down from what it has been this delightfully rainy and cool spring.  We got out before the canoe livery opened and so had the river to ourselves, except for a few fisherman, lots of waterfowl and their babies, and also one very large deer not far off in the woods river left whom we actually heard growl, loudly.  Do deer growl? He seemed happy, so maybe it was a playful growl? Was it really not the deer growling but something else behind the deer, a predator?  The river carried us past the deer before we could tell.  This was the only bit of drama–the rest was smooth paddling on a fantastic day.

A Quick Visit to the Bridges

Huron River, around the Obama and Foster Bridges

19 May 2017

We only had about an hour to spare on this blustery spring day, but we wanted to get a paddle in, so we headed to the pond right above Barton Dam for a quick paddle-around.  A mama goose and her lone remaining gosling, who looked sorta grade-school aged, were miffed at us for interrupting their breakfast time at our put-in spot and scooted away grumbling at us.  We also saw a blue heron, a green heron, and a whole passel of red-winged blackbirds, those old friends of waterways anywhere.  Big fish darted beneath our boats; a muskrat or beaver kept bobbing its head up in the pond and then going back under, Marco-Polo-style.  Good company overall.

Superfast

Huron River, Argo Park to Gallup Park

15 April 2017

Ellen and I got ourselves to the river early in the morning for this paddle to beat high winds we knew were coming later in the day.  As I was waiting with the boats for Ellen to get back from our take-out spot, a jogger who had just run over the dam passed me saying, “You’re gonna have a fast trip!  The river is screaming over the dam!”

She wasn’t lying. We’ve had a ton of rain; the river gauge read 1710 that morning, down from over 2,600 earlier in the week, but the current coming off the dam was still strong and turned our boats into rollercoasters for the whole bit of river between the ponds.  The river banks were underwater and surly waterfowl swum around tree trunks anxious, we think, that we might get too close to their nests. So it goes in the spring.