February 2014 we hit the Texas Colorado River. This would mark my return to the canoe, the river and river camping. 2014 turned out a momentous year for me. Cole, my then 18 year old son would join the Marines. Dottie, my wife would have a major surgery to allieve a chronic and potentially terminal illness. By years end I would also return to the muzzleloader. It was a tough year. The career changes I looked forward to would occur years later and on separate occasions.
I never wanted to return to the river because I never intended to leave it. By degrees we canoed less and less. When we finally stopped canoeing the river (and the river camping that went with it) it was just something we were going to get back to. I had not abandoned all camping. In those years the river was forgotten. It was something I thought would always be there. Dad got into competitive shooting. I married and was working as had my brother Todd. My friends Bill and Paul married and moved on with life too. My cousin David graduated college and moved to Asia. So on and so on. New years 2014 found me wanting to pass one more piece of heritage to Cole before shipping off to San Diego. I figured we would enjoy and remember an overnight canoe camping trip.
Originally Cole and I planned to make the trip on our own. For years I intended to buy a canoe but I had not gotten to it. Generously Dad agreed to let us use the Chestnut cedar and canvas canoe. Dad built a canoe rack for his pickup truck and took that canoe for a test run on a local lake. It leaked! We tried out the 17 Quachita aluminum canoe and it leaked too. So Dad bought a Royalex Old Town Tripper from TG Canoe. Dad wanted to try out the new canoe. So in February 2014 Dad, Cole and I hit the river in the Old Town Tripper 172.
We packed the 17' Tripper with gear the way we used to pack the 18' Chestnut Prospector, heavy. We expected the river to be the way we remembered too. The first hours on the Texas Colorado I kept thinking it had been five or ten years since I had canoed or been on the river. But I wrestled with incongruent time lines and life events. Over the two days of the trip I realized I had been away from the river a staggering twenty-two years!
I manned the stern, Cole sat in the middle and Dad had the bow. We all paddled. Dad and I tried to meld our memories of the river with what we witnessed. Dad expected the gravel bar or the snagged log from our past trips to be around the bend. But when we rounded that bend we found a view that...we had never seen.
The topper for Dad and me was Texas was in the middle of a prolonged drought. A series of droughts had plagued Texas since 1996. The river was now at an unprecedented low stage. We made notice that the willow trees we were accustomed to seeing were mostly absent. The droughts of the past fifteen years had killed them out. Now and again a sand bar stretched out across the river. From a distance it appeared to block the channel, but upon arrival we found the river narrowed and poured across. These places the river was very shallow. Here and there the river narrowed to a ten yard slot surrounded by stretches of shallow pools where water slipped over a ridge into the stream. Islands clogged the river with a trickle of flow on one side and a narrow slot of water on the other. These things we had never seen before.
At a brain stem level we were aware the river was down and Texas was in a drought, but to say we were completely cognizant would be generous. We knew some of the facts but we did not know how they affected us. We would learn.
In the past you could count on the fast side of a bends depth to carry the canoe and allow you to maneuver past obstacles and shallows of the opposite bank. This was not the case now. Frequently the the small inverted "V" of navigable water would be in the middle of the river or even on the slow side. With the river level and volume so low the riverbed was becoming a miniature canyon. The river streams were finding new paths in the confines of the old river bed. The Colorado was beginning to braid.
When we came to a place where a sandbar stretched nearly all the way across the river I called for a break. Heaped atop the sandbar on the "fast side" of the river was a bluff. We got out and stretched our legs.
I climbed the bluff. This elevation allowed me to see the phenomena of the present Colorado River. Mystified, I looked over the river. Had the river filled with sand? I knew it was winter but still, where were the willows? It looked like gravel and sand had washed in and filled the river. The passages we maneuvered through were as unnerving as the observations Dad and I made. I looked downstream. The next immediate challenge was another sandbar that stretched well past the middle of the river. At the end of the sandbar, all the way to the left of the river lay an open section of potentially navigable water. Not to far down the river passed between two low, gentle swells. The Colorado looked very narrow and very shallow here. The two gently sloped banks converged beneath a veneer of water. Maybe we could make it without lining the canoe.
We were too far into the trip to turn around now. I hate admitting defeat, that combined with the arduous upstream trip would be miserable. We regrouped at the canoe and I shared three candy bars. I intended the chocolate to celebrate victory but now I used them to break the douer spirits. Together we made overly optimistic calculations of our progress and how far we had to go. We walked the canoe past the shallows of the gravel and wet launched. Our paddle blades bit into the gravel as we traversed the meager flows.
Not to far from this bluff we came to the one familiar site, the Moon Rocks.
A few miles downstream we came to another obstacle. Here the river was straight and broad. Far downstream we saw a gentle "break" in the water. We saw a strange thing. We did not know what this meant or what it was but we soon figured it out. For hundreds of yards the entire river floated over an enormous sandbar. The sandbar stretched all the way across the river and was as flat and wide as the river's surface. The river depth was eighteen inches to a foot deep. There was no slot of V to follow. The closer we got to the break the shallower the river became. We had to walk the loaded canoe the last hundred yards to the break. At the end of this walk we had to lift the loaded canoe in order to float it. The break was the shallowest place that part of the river. It stretched from one side to the other. At that break the river fell away from the sand bar making a micro waterfall that barely caused a ripple. The depth of the river at the crest of the break was two or three inches. Twenty yards downstream the break the river was deep enough to float our loaded canoe and board it.
Further down, around a bend or two, gravel bars guarded the head of an island. One side of the island was narrow and impassable. The other side had some speed but was rocky, shallow and curved sharply. Tree roots jutted out of the dirt banks into the water and air. This passage was barely thirty yards wide.
We considered running the crooked slot, but decided against it. The heavily loaded canoe road deep in the shallow stream. Should we have to abandon the slot in the turbulence, exiting the canoe would hazard an extreme loss of time and inconvenience. Dad especially wanted to avoid swamping the canoe.
Barefoot we got out and floated the canoe past the island. The rocks hurt our bare feet. In deeper water we reentered the canoe. This was more than an island, it was a chunk of land clogging the reduced stream of the Colorado.
There were other odd obstacles. One was a water logged tree trunk left grounded by higher waters. The skeletal canopy extended into the navigable V of deeper water. Another partial portage.
Eventually we came to a medium sized sandbar we mistook for Tate Bend.
In reality we were only ten river miles down from Columbus. We were still five river miles up from the Tate Bend paradise we had camped on years ago. Setting foot on a sandbar reminds me of what Neil Armstrong might have felt when he first stepped on the moon. We made camp and our spirits rose. Dad set up his four man Eureka Timberline tent and Cole and I set up my Eureka Grand Mana 9 tent. Between us we had the two tents, three sleeping bags, three folding chairs, an Igloo of food, water and ice, extra clothes, fishing tackle and on and on and on. We overpacked. I estimate we had 950 pounds of gear and people in that Old Town Tripper 172. The canoe was up to the weight, but under the conditions of the river...a lighter loaded canoe might have made a difference. Who knows?
We explored the sandbar. I found the skeleton of a small alligator gar.
Cole caught a small bass at the headwaters of the sandbar. Much had changed over the years. We set up camp near some sycamore trees. At the water's edge we found what we thought was coyote tracks and scat. There were crushed muscle shells mixed into the scat. Odd. Something was not quite right about these signs. As the evening advanced we heard what I thought was two trees rubbing together.
We built a cook fire. By now I was used to building and cooking a fire made with oak and pecan wood. I readjusted to building a fire out of the "trash wood" of sycamore and cottonwood. Dad brought some instant food and it turned out to be a good thing. We boiled water in the an old camp coffee cooker for the "space food."
As the winter evening fell we listened to the coyotes and owls. A freight train rumbled by a half mile off. Cole and I stayed up after dark. Dad had gone to bead. We told him we would not stay up to late. Dad wanted to make sure we were able to make the rest of the run in the morning.
I had a nice powerful flashlight that night. That is how we discovered the source of the curious tracks and scat. We heard something in the water across the river. I shined my light and discovered some ROUS, Rodents Of Unusual Size. At first I thought they were nutria rats but their flat tails revealed the truth. Beavers! The grinding sound we heard earlier must have been the beavers gnawing trees. I don't remember what we talked about but it was good to be with Cole. Seeing those beaver marked the time and place in our minds. Cole and I had never seen beavers before.
The next morning early, a sounder of feral hogs came out on the sandbar below camp. Dad restarted the fire off the coals and cooked some coffee. We pieced together a breakfast. We broke camp and set out in the canoe. From here on the river widened and deepened. Likely this is the result of the Garwood low water dam ten or so miles downstream. It brought little comfort though. Every obstacle required a high level of calculation and the potential lining of the canoe. We thought we would see the bridge about an hour after shoving off. In this we again overestimated our speed and distance traveled. We underestimated the delays of getting out and lining the canoe the day before. We also underestimated the remaining distance to paddle. Not to mention we were essentially...kind of lost. We did not know at the time, but an hour after push off Sunday morning we were still had not reached yesterday's intended destination of Tate Bend. From push off we had about four hours to go to the Altair bridge.
All in all The Return to Tate Bend trip was more or less a discombobulating, near out of body experience. The river had changed and did not mesh with our experiences. There was sort of a wrinkle, or ripple in time. There was no tesseract or transcendental time tunnel but the lapse or loss in time nearly made me dizzy. It was as if we had paddled onto a lost river or into The Land of the Lost. Had a sleestack stepped onto a sandbar in the evening twilight it would not have disturbed me more!
Eventually we made it to what I came to call the Lower Tate Bend. We knew it only for its size. Tate Bend is a famous, large, high sandbar. The shade giving willows that once crowned its crest were gone. Not even their dead trunks remained. We paddled on, again as if we had somehow canoed into a place so changed and strange we could not recognize our surroundings. The disconnect jarred me no less than the ending of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes. Soon enough but later than we predicted the Altair bridge loomed into view. We had made it. At least the sun still set in the west!
We saw no other people on this trip. After some reflection and other experiences I have come to appreciate the river at low stages as well as when it is running higher.
Eventually the drought ended and the Colorado River rose to better levels. There were still tough times for me ahead, but trips like this spawned other river adventures and provided a foundation of health and experience.
Thanks for reading.
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