On April 23rd, four Houston Canoe Club members joined up to car pool together to the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas, for a week-long expedition paddle covering 71 miles. The four members were Ken Anderson, Dana Enos, John Rich and Paul Woodcock. Joining up with us in Arkansas was Ronnie Fetzko from Tallahassee, Florida.
The Texans joined forces to ride together in Dana's shiny new car, pulling Paul's well-traveled but solid canoe trailer. Everyone threw some money into a common kitty fund for shared expenses like gas, campgrounds and shuttle fee, and off we went.
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Loading boats
in Houston |
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Gear in trailer |
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| Flooded tent pad |
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The drive was about 12 hours total, of which we did 8 hours the first day, camping overnight in a lovely Arkansas State Park called DeGray Lake. That night, a torrential downpour ensued, creating problems for everyone, no matter how good you thought your tent's rain fly was. The tent pads at the campground had nice little concrete walls around them to contain the soft pea gravel for comfortable tent sleeping. However, when you combine that much rain with a concrete wall, you get... a swimming pool! The only thing that saved me was a sheet of plastic I used as a liner on the inside of my tent, to keep water from coming up through the tent floor.
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Dana's colorful
dry bags |
Dana has a good organization system for his camping gear, choosing to put a lot of different items each in their own small dry bag. This eliminates the problem of digging through one large jam-packed bag trying to find a single small item. The only problem with this idea, however, is remembering in which bag you placed the item.
With about 4 hours of driving on the 2nd day, we arrived at the Buffalo River, at the site of an old General Store in the tiny town of Gilbert, Arkansas, where our outfitter would provide the shuttle service for us. The hour and a half drive for one vehicle was $150. Other put-in locations are cheaper. They were also diligent at checking water conditions for us with the local National Park service folks, filling out a permit, and informing us of the park rules.
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| Outfitter canoes |
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Outfitter's logo |
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Buffalo River map |
Congress made the Buffalo River a "National River" in 1972 to preserve it in its natural state. Thank you for that! It flows through the beautiful Ozark Mountains, and is chock full of Class I and Class II rapids, providing plenty of entertainment, with little danger. The banks of the river are lined with bluffs as high as 440 feet, composed of sandstone, limestone and dolomite. In addition to the cliffs, there are waterfalls, springs, caves and forests, as well as historic log cabins and cemeteries. It's an absolutely gorgeous river that you simply must put on your to-do list. It reminds me a lot of west Texas rivers, except that you have lots of trees instead of cactus.
At certain times of year, the river is said to be inundated with hordes of paddlers, so you may want to time your visit to avoid those. Our week on the river saw only one large group - a batch of teenagers on a multi-day field trip from a private school. I wish I had grown up in a school like that. There are convenient "pocket parks" every dozen miles or so, providing convenient places to camp overnight with pit toilets and water, if you wish to use them. We chose primitive camping on the riverbank for the quiet and solitude, but stopped at the parks to replenish our water supplies, so we wouldn't have to carry an entire week's worth in the boats.
We wanted to put-in at Ponca, but the water level was reported to be too low there. So we started downstream a few miles at Steel Creek, which can be seen on the left side of the map. From there, we would travel 71 miles downstream to our take-out at Gilbert, on the right side of the map, where our vehicle would be waiting for us.
After our shuttle driver dropped us off at the boat ramp put-in, some drama began. Since it was late in the day, our intention was to camp overnight at the put-in, and start the river paddling the next morning. But the campground was about a mile from the boat ramp, and access to the river from the campground was difficult. So we decided to camp across from the boat ramp - there was no indication that this was not allowed. So we unloaded our boats and gear, the shuttle driver departed, and we started making camp. That's when a volunteer park ranger arrived, and informed us that camping is not allowed there. We had no means to relocate, since our vehicle was now gone. So we had no choice but to go ahead and pack our boats, get on the river, paddle out of sight around the bend, find a gravel bar and camp on the river. This made for a late and tiresome first day.
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| Put-in site |
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On the river! |
With the deluge of rain the previous night, we were very concerned about a possible rising water level. Some local folks told us it wouldn't be a problem, but we were skeptical. Not knowing the terrain and how water flows in that area, most campers played it safe and climbed a bank to camp on high ground in the woods. John stayed on the gravel bar, up against the riverbank. Besides, there were thorns up there in the woods that could puncture a comfy inflatable sleeping pad. A cairn of rocks was built at the water's edge to keep an eye on the water level. As it turned out, the river did rise overnight, but only about one inch!
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| Camp, Day 1 |
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Water level cairn |
Arising on Day 2, we began our first "real" day on the beautiful river. The water levels are more shallow at this upper end, to grow deeper as you travel downstream. Scraping bottom was a bit common at first. Numerous times we had to step out of our heavily-laden boats to float them over riffles. The deeper channels were easier to see because they were a beautiful emerald green in color.
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| Paul in riffles |
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Ronnie approaching bluff |
We stopped for a side-hike up to a place with the quaint name of "Hemmed-in Hollow". Three-quarters of a mile up a creek bed is the highest waterfall between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, at 220 feet high. The waterfall location is so tall, and the woods so dense, that you can't stand back far enough to get a photo of the entire waterfall from top to bottom. So what you get below is a photo of the water pouring off the top, and a second photo of the splashdown pool at the bottom. You could walk around and stand in that cave behind the waterfall, but actually standing underneath the falling water was a very slippery proposition due to algae growing on the wet rocks.
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Hemmed-In Hollow
waterfall |
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Splashdown! |
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| Paul weaving new seat |
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And this began the cycle of the trip: Paddling for a couple of hours in the morning, stopping to rest, paddling to lunch time, lunch, paddling a few more hours, rest, finding a campsite after 4 pm, making camp, dinner, campfire and conversation. Campfires were built every night except the first and last. So went six wonderful days and nights in the wilderness.
Paul's woven cane seat broke through on his canoe, so he made a temporary patch with duct tape, and that evening he pulled out a spool of cord and ingeniously wove himself a new one.
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Ken alongside
rock bluff |
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Dana & Ken
grab a nap |
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John in water
cave |
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| Scenic campsite |
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Campfire |
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Butterflies |
Let's talk critters. The river was full of fish, but didn't seem to have any real monster-size fish. But there were a number of people floating along in canoes, fishing for dinner every night with great success. Turtles were plentiful, often perching themselves up high on logs sticking out of the water, and performing high-dives back into the water when you got too close. I had the pleasure of watching one turtle through the crystal clear water sort of half-walk and half-swim along the bottom underneath me.
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| Turtles |
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Buzzards circle |
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Elk track |
There were buzzards everywhere, often circling in thermals in great numbers, and gliding alongside the cliffs so close that the bird and their shadow almost merged. There were egrets, blue herons, kingfishers and plenty of others which I can't identify. Ducks would be disturbed by our presence and fly downstream to escape, only to have us arrive again forcing them to repeat the maneuver. The kingfishers are smart enough to circle around behind us through the woods, so that they are done with our intrusion in just one try.
An otter was spotted running alongside the river and hopping over rocks. And by gosh, they even have elk up here! We were not fortunate enough to spy a real elk, and had to settle for enjoying their tracks in the sand. In the elk track photo at right, a 3" chap stick is used for scale to show the large size of the tracks, compared to deer.
And then there were the blood-curdling screams from some kind of animal fight, that kept occurring over and over again, all night long. We tried to imagine what kind of creatures could be making such a hellish noise, and we guessed that it was a couple of bobcats. I slept with a paddle outside my tent door to use in defense in case werewolves invaded our campsite in the middle of the night. Our Florida paddler, Ronnie, seems to have now identified this sound as foxes. You can listen to a similar example, here: thefoxden/sounds. Select the "fox_territory_call.wav" file and listen to it. Then there was the nocturnal whippoorwill bird at one campsite that started his mantra at sunset, and went on all night long until sunrise, over and over again, driving us all nuts. You would think they would go hoarse after a while!
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| Canoe below bluff |
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Dana floats on
emerald water |
Quite by chance, our last night's campsite ended up being along a public river access point by a bridge, just four miles from our take-out point. This prompted Dana to come up with a brilliant idea: Instead of everyone laboriously packing boats in the morning for a short 4-mile run, he pointed out that all we really needed was one boat to go to the take-out to pick up the truck, and bring it back to the campsite. That way, we would save packing and loading all that gear into our boats, and could put it directly into the trailer for the trip home.
Dana, Paul and John all wanted to complete the trip to the take-out, leaving Ken and Ronnie behind to guard the gear. And once again, to simplify things, all three of us decided to go in a single boat. Since my tandem canoe was the largest, with an 1,100-lb capacity, we piled in and started paddling: Dana in front, John in back, and Paul sitting uncomfortably on a thwart. It was a bit awkward coordinating three paddlers, and despite the nearly 100 years of combined paddling experience, we still managed to unintentionally eddy-out once. Go figure. But we did manage to cover the four miles in just 50 minutes!
Once the truck was driven back to the campsite, the next trick was to figure out how to get five boats on a four-boat trailer. That was a short-term situation, whereby we needed to get Ronnie back to her vehicle which was at the put-in site. Once there, Ronnie put her boat on her own vehicle, and we straightened out the boats on the trailer for the long drive home to Houston.
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| Three in one! |
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Five in four! |
This was another fantastic trip, with amazing scenery and experiences, with incredible people. I feel fortunate to be able to experience such events, and I'm grateful to Dana Enos and Louis Aulbach for inviting this one-time stranger along for a canoe trip, several years ago, based upon only a couple of chance random encounters at west Texas campsites. They've started me along on a new path in life that provides me with many wonderful adventures and friendships.
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Group photo: John, Dana,
Paul, Ronnie, Ken |