Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Category Archives: Paddling
This weekend: Paddle up!
Paddle a swamp, paddle someone else’s boat, paddle a dragon.
Coast
There’s great cache in being able to say you paddled the Great Dismal Swamp. After all, people have gone into the massive wetland in the northeast corner of the state (and southeast Virginia) and never come out. On Saturday’s Kayaking the Canal paddle at Dismal Swamp State Park you can earn both Dismal bragging rights and, since it’s ranger-led and on a canal, be assured that you will emerge unscathed (save, perhaps, a mosquito bite or two if you don’t later up beforehand).
Don’t let Andrea rain on your weekend fun
Wondering what kinks Tropical Storm Andrea may have put in your weekend plans?
Paddling. If you were planning on paddling, you might think again. With projected rainfall amounts of four inches or greater, some local rivers may be swollen to the dangerous level, especially for less experienced paddlers. Your best bet for assessing paddle conditions on specific rivers is to check with the outfitters who serve them. Find a list of 44 such outfitters, specifically those who rent canoes and kayaks, here. If you’re familiar with a specific waterway, you can check levels and flows at the U.S. Geological Survey site, here. If you need help interpreting what those numbers mean — what’s optimum, what’s safe, what’s not — you should have a copy of Paul Ferguson’s “Paddling Eastern North Carolina” for the eastern part of the state, the Benner boys’ “Carolina Whitewater: A Paddler’s Guide to the Western Carolinas” for the west.
This weekend: Raft, gaze, run
Make a mini raft (then ride the real thing), beat the heat with a nighttime search for Saturn, race on mountain trails. That’s what tops our list of thrills this weekend in North Carolina.
Coast
All spring, my stepson and his buddies spent their weekends building a raft — a raft they planned to ride for 35 miles on the Cape Fear River. Having paddled the Cape Fear I was a tad skeptical, what with the seemingly non-raft-friendly Class I-II drops along the way. But these guys being bright and well versed in the engineering arts, I kept my thoughts to myself: They’ll be fine. And after their three-day trip this past weekend, they were.
Paddling: Jordan Lake keeps a secret (for now)
I was pretty sure one of two things would happen when I got to this point, and both were good. Now, as I neared my objective the preferred scenario appeared to be unfolding. Preferred, even if it meant my overall objective would be foiled. For now.
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