Paddling the Reach

Readers of this blog might be familiar with the un-engineering works going on south of downtown on our San Antonio River. (This link will take you to my posts about the river our city was named for.)

The de-channelization of the river downstream from downtown—known as the Mission Reach—is proceeding wonderfully. And we had another new experience on one of the most recently finished sections last weekend.

This stretch is really special, since you not only can walk or bike along it, but you can even paddle! The 1.6 mile section from Mission Road to Padre Park has been de-channelized, alright, but they've also put some small channels back in...to accommodate kayakers and canoists.

The features in the picture above are at what is now the end of the navigable stretch and as yet aren't open to boaters, but they will be soon. 

Here's one of the canoe chutes that is open for traffic. We were going back upstream here and Henry was helpful enough to pull my boat part of the way up the chute:

The 5 or 6 of these features on the section of river we paddled are really nice and reasonably well-designed for boating. Given that you can—without too much trouble—go both upstream and down through them, means that you can double the 1.6 miles and give yourself a fairly nice paddle. Eventually, we'll be able to make a 5 mile trip out of it, after they put in some more chutes and re-engineer some upstream drops that weren't made boater-friendly at the outset.

Last Saturday was the formal opening of this little canoe trail and we joined some dignitaries, and several other groups of paddling enthusiasts for the maiden voyage. Here are some of the paddlers, waiting for the politicos to come and do their speechifying (they were only a half hour late):

As you can see, we had a gorgeous day for the event and enjoyed the short journey very much. The bridge you can see above is the VFW Avenue crossing, where we put in and took out. We first (along with the dignitaries) floated down to the features at Padre Park. Then we went back upstream as far as we could (to Mission Road) and then back down to VFW Avenue. 

Along the way we saw lots of birds: several cormorants, like the handsome fellow on the right here, several egrets, and a lot of ducks. You know you're doing your re-naturalization work well if the birds are there in strength.

And the water was surprisingly clear for most of the stretch:

Here's a map of the Mission Reach in its entirety, which gives us a lot to look forward to. In another year or so, we'll be able to paddle all the way down to the last Mission, Espada!