Wordless Wednesday: Waiting for Henry (not Godot)

 

A much-needed break on the river

social distancing, Guadalupe-River-style

We took advice to get outside and exercise perhaps a bit to the extreme yesterday and went for a short paddle on the upper Guadalupe. Paddling! On a Wednesday! That sounds like a silver lining if ever there was one.

The day was beautiful and the river was flowing just enough to allow scrape-free floating. Here's where we started, at James Kiehl Park:

An especially noteworthy sight along the way was the multitude of just-leafing-out cypress trees...

I was so entranced by these lovelies that I spent a bit of time at our lunch stop (where we kept our distance and didn't share) to take some closeups. Here are the best two:

Of course all the trees along the river look great from more of a distance, too...

There were equally photogenic rocks, since this is the south Texas hill country and all we have under our feet there is at most two or three inches of dirt, then limestone all the way down...

...and turtles!

It was overall a very relaxing and much-needed escape from worries of the day. We are so lucky here to have nature so close at hand and easy to access.

I was doubly pleased to be paddling since it has been a really long time since I was on the river. My shoulder issues seem to have lessened and I'm again confident enough to handle a short, easy paddle like this one. 

All too soon, however, our little idyll was at an end. Here's the Waring bridge:

I hope we can do this again soon. And I hope all my dear readers are able to find a similar way to stay safe, stay sane, and find peace in these crazy times.

Long time, no paddle

We have water! Actually, we have 'way too much water, but that's kind of the way it is around here: not really feast or famine, but rather absurdly forced feeding until you explode, or famine.

Last weekend we headed out to our friend's cabin near Leakey, in order to mount a paddle on the Frio River, which is usually not paddleable at all. But as you can see, above, our recent rains brought it up to the very nice level of 275 cfs.* 

Although this doesn't sound like much, the high flow did necessitate some adjustment of our plans for launching and shuttling, since most of us were reluctant to drive across Third Crossing, where we launched, like this truck did.

This lovely river, with its crystal clear water and banks graced with tons of stately cypress trees, gave us an exciting and enjoyable afternoon of boating fun.

view from our launch site, on the near side of the river

delicate cypress branches not quite turning yet
(we did see some getting reddish later on)

the view downriver

This pair of cypress are possibly the largest, and most gorgeous, I've ever seen; aren't they spectacular?!

As you can tell from these shots, the scenery around this part of the Frio is especially wonderful. From the trees I've been gushing about, to some particularly handsome—and rugged—cliffs...

this hardly looks like it's in Texas, does it?

view from our friend's cabin

Our lodging spot isn't on the Frio itself, but rather one of its forks...still quite scenic, and with more water than usual.

Here are the little rapids just down the hill...

...and the fork, with lovely fall blooms in the foreground...

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*As an example of the water feast-or-famine that I mentioned above, go back and look at the pictures I showed you of the Frio and imagine the water to be 10 feet higher; that's what it was like just two days after our paddle, and after a lot more rain (the rain that caused the tragic Llano flooding that's on view in the link near the top of this post). From 275 cfs on Saturday, it crested at 23,000 on Monday morning. Feast or famine, indeed.

Family fun in Colorado waters

Thanks to Sally for taking this cute picture of the fam in the raft we fondly call the Battlestar. 

She, Travis, Henry, and I had floated on the Arkansas in it several years ago, but on a different section. This time we started at the Big Bend (not the one in Texas) put-in—one of the fabulous facilities provided by the Arkansas River Headwaters Recreation Area—and finished up at the ramp in the middle of beautiful downtown Salida.

Unfortunately the day we picked for this excursion (after needed repairs were made to the raft we didn't really have much choice) was cloudy, a little rainy, and somewhat chilly, especially for the two members of our party who couldn't get their heart rates up by paddling...

and of course Mom sacrificed her jacket;
notice Gramma selfishly putting hers on in the background

But everyone enjoyed it anyway. The first section, where rocks were more of an issue, was a little more exciting than we had expected, but sailing into town was pretty relaxing...

[Parenthetical aside regarding the raft: Henry and an engineer friend later spent 3 days designing and partially constructing a super-storage-facility for the raft in our cabin's garage:

The idea is that next time it won't need as much repair if it's stored properly. We'll see.]

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Although the raft trip was our major interaction with Colorado streams, it wasn't our only one.

We have a favorite waterfall nearby, just up a county road from Angel of Shavano Campground. I've probably visited it a hundred times, with many different groups of people, but was still quite excited to introduce it to our Adorable Granddaughter...

The water was a little chilly for wading, so she changed out of her cute swimsuit early on and actually had more fun clambering around the rocks with Dad than she would have had swimming...

She loves to climb!

More rocks and more water are even closer to our home base in Garfield. The little stream behind our cabin (whose noise makes it so easy to drift off to sleep at night or naptime) is crossed by a bridge just down Main Street. And around the bridge is a great place to toss rocks and sticks in the water, and do more rock clambering...

the shallow water here is a little more conducive to wading

I can remember when her Dad loved to come down to this very spot and play in the stream...so great to see that his daughter loves it, too!

A horseshoe for luck

I forgot to eat my black-eyed peas for luck on New Year's day. (This is apparently a custom in the southeastern US, and since I grew up in Houston, which is in many ways more akin to the Old South than the rest of Texas, I have always observed this rite. Until this year, that is.)

We were at Canyon Lake for the weekend, eating too much non-pea food, hosting friends, and shooting off the kind of fireworks that are not legal inside the San Antonio city limits but that Henry is quite fond of. 

I also had a very nice walk around our CL neighborhood on New Year's Eve; here's one of the nice views I snapped while strolling:

Doesn't that look nice and peaceful?

However, since I usually don't think about the peas until NYE at the earliest, it never occurred to me to put a can in with the stuff we took to the lake on NYEE. (Plus, I don't even have any cans of peas on hand; I've been lately transitioning away, pretty successfully, from canned veggies and soups to the fresh and homemade variety.)

Anyway, this is all a round-about way of expressing my concerns about luck in the upcoming year, due to the lack of peas in our diet on the appropriate day.

However, we did go paddling on NYD (this has been a tradition among our paddling friends), and the lovely feature where we stopped for lunch is shown at the top of the post: Horseshoe Falls. Most of us, myself included, not at all surprisingly, portaged this rather tricky falls, but Henry went over it as smooth as silk:

So I'm holding out hope that this will suffice for our family's luck guarantee for 2017.

It was a beautiful day for a paddle, not nearly as cold as we had been fearing. And the scenery was terrific. We were on the lower Guadalupe, below Canyon Dam (we can't go here in the summer because the river's choked with toobers), and the banks here are much more developed. 

But there are some stretches where the topography ensures a more wilderness-like experience:

And the river itself is just as beautiful here as upstream:

Horseshoe Falls side channels

the Falls from almost rock-level

So, keep your fingers crossed for me in 2017!

Before the freeze

It's turned really cold here, and really quickly!

Saturday we had a pleasant upper-60's-lower-70's paddle on the San Marcos River. (And Joline came with us! That's her in the front of Henry's canoe amid lovely autumn leaves in the photo above.)

Then Sunday morning it plunged to freezing and didn't get much warmer all day. [Note to northern readers: this is cold for us.]

So we were doubly glad that we were able to enjoy the warmth on Saturday. And we weren't the only ones taking advantage: there were lots of turtles trying to catch a little passive solar...

this is just one of the turtle "families" we saw

...even though with the cloudy skies, there wasn't a whole lot of solar on offer.

The flow of the river was quite brisk and so we didn't have a lot of work to do until we got to the slow water behind Staples Dam, which is where the photo at the top of the post was taken, as well as this one:

The leaves and the reflections on the still water were so pretty I couldn't resist taking several photos, and didn't even mind the extra paddling required...at least not too much.

Of course the San Marcos has seen [what seems like] more than its share of big floods in the last couple of years (the link is to a story about their latest). And all that high water can't help but carve out changes in the riverbed; several of my paddling companions have better river memories than I do and could point to where such changes are most noticeable.

But it's clear even to someone like myself, who can never remember which stretch of which river has which rapids, that some recent changes in topography have occurred. Like these new cliff-faces:

pretty high!

exposed roots and a tree that was too close to the edge

Our trip was nice and calm, though, with only these (among other) pieces of visual evidence hinting at past violence.

We even got a little sunshine just before taking out! Nothing like diamonds on the river!

Transparency in nature

I do have have few more posts to milk from my August-September travels, but I thought I'd take a break and make a report on a paddling excursion closer to home

Weekend before last we took advantage of some higher-than-usual flows on the Medina and paddled a lovely stretch of this river that we don't get to see very often.

What was most appealing about the trip for me was the amazing clarity of the water. I hadn't seen water this clear since our wild adventure on the Devils River in 2010. Unfortunately, this Medina excursion also duplicated some of the negative features of that previous trip—specifically, too much excitement and concomitant hard work!—but I think you'll agree that the water was gorgeous when you see this selection from the many photos I took of its crystalline transparency.

doesn't it look like Henry is paddling on air?

lots of pretty plants and rocks to look at on the bottom

it's like a glass-bottom boat that stretches across the whole stream!

even in the deeper spots, you still can see straight down to the bottom

I was so entranced by the appearance of the water from on top, that I didn't get around to taking any underwater shots until we stopped for lunch...

As you can see, the water wasn't deep enough to be really dangerous for most of the paddle, but there were some tricky sections and I went swimming—non-intentionally—twice. Here's Larry expertly negotiating one of these little twisty-passages (they were "all different": Adventure reference!)

What made them tricky was the narrowness of the river at these points, which made the current really swift and left paddlers little time for adjustments.

Fortunately the shallow water made it pretty easy for me to retrieve my boat after my mishaps and get back in, but such adventures do tend to wear you out. And several of our compatriots had similar experiences, some of which involved sit-inside kayaks which aren't so easy to get back on track as my sit-on-top. So our trip ended up lasting probably twice as long as we had expected. I haven't been that tired in a long time!

But it was a lovely day and a mostly fun paddle in gorgeous water, so I'm glad I participated.