At the behest of Amanda Hughes-Horan, five of us paddlers set out on the Old River from the 1409 bridge on Monday, May 23. Amanda organized our group as part of her work for the city of Mont Belvieu which is expanding Joe Matthews Park to include a state-of-the-art kayak and canoe launch. She needed some photos from the water for their advertising and of course any excuse to go and paddle will work for the rest of us, who included Joe Coker, David Henderson, and Leslie Taylor.
We will really look forward to that new access point. For those of you who’ve used the 1409 put in area, you’ll remember the deep ruts and holes in the area that normally passes as its access. Someone apparently decided to improve on it by dumping loads of dirt. Looks nicer on the surface but is no doubt very soft and NOT for our non-offroad vehicles. Here’s what it looks like:
We carried/dragged/wheeled our boats down to the riverbank which thankfully wasn’t just soft oozing mud, or littered with dead animals, as it occasionally has been in the past.
Weatherwise we totally lucked out, it was a cool day and non-rainy. It was about 70 degrees F when we put in and while on the river occasional puffs of cool area felt oh so wonderful after the hot and steamy 90s of so much of the preceding week.
The 1409 bridge has quite the colony of swallows nesting. My point and shoot camera was not the equal to catching the birds, but here’s what their nests look like and almost all of them had babies:
It’s been a while since I’ve been on Old River and I’d forgotten how truly beautiful it is, and well shaded. Look forward to more summer paddle trips.
David and Amanda are quite the expert birders, and David identified 30 different species on our trip, including many that we only heard and did not see. I now know that the cackling sound, like a hen just having laid its egg, is the yellow-billed cuckoo.
Distance from 1409 to Joe Matthews Park is 1.88 miles. Yeah, I think I’m finally getting the hang of my GPS. It was so lovely we couldn’t resist paddling on from there to the spot that has often been a lunch spot on HCC trips, 3.54 miles from 1409. Here’s a panoramic view of Joe Matthews Park from the water:
It will be a most welcome launch site for trips both upriver and downriver.
I always enjoy wildflowers in bloom and the pickerelweed at the edge of the river were the standouts this trip.
It was an absolutely lovely day on the water, we wish you could have been there too. Check out our HCC website to see Joe’s photos, and our FB page for more of my own photos.
Here’s the map of our trip. Someday I’ll learn to do a better job of downloading maps from the GPS but this gives you a pretty good idea.
