Chain of Rocks

This past weekend Martha and I made a trip up to St. Louis to visit some friends and watch our favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, play a couple of games.  Just so happens that there's a short whitewater section on the Mississippi River a few miles above downtown St. Louis.  The "Chain of Rocks," as it's known, develops its best whitewater features at low water, and that's certainly where the Mississippi has been for the last couple of months.  So I pulled my whitewater boat out of the weeds in the backyard and threw it up on the car.

The river is so low right now that it's almost too low even for playing at Chain of Rocks.  The playspots are ideal from about 4 feet to 7 feet on the St. Louis gauge, and when I went out there Sunday morning the level was 2.1 feet.  There were still several decent playspots, but they were all shallow and bony.  But on a sizzling mid-July day, even shallow and bony whitewater is hard to beat.

Here are a few photos from Sunday morning.  They were taken with cell phones and similar devices, so the resolution is not very good.  But you can see what's going on.

The preferred putin is on the Illinois side.  There is access on the Missouri side, but there's a history of vehicle break-ins there.  Most of the good playspots are on the Missouri side, so the paddler who puts in on the Illinois side must do the long ferry across.  I spend lots of time on the Mississippi at Memphis, so the ferry doesn't really faze me, but it is dreaded by whitewater-only paddlers.  This photo, taken by John Niebling from the old Chain of Rocks bridge, shows me (the little speck toward bottom right) making the ferry.  The white water below me is formed as the river flows over the Chain of Rocks dam.  The interesting-looking tower is an old water intake structure.

I was met on the river by a group of local paddlers including Bilbo Eades and Michael Dee, who play here in the hole formed by the Blockhouse wing dam.  The old Chain of Rocks bridge is just upriver; the bridge above it is Interstate 270.

Michael Dee plays around in Rookie hole.  Photo by Bilbo Eades.

Here I am trying to do a flat spin in Cobblestone hole.  At 2.1 feet on the St. Louis gauge, Cobblestone is by far the best whitewater feature at Chain of Rocks.  Sadly, it's sort of a one-shot deal because eddy service is virtually nonexistent.  Once you get blown out of it the choices are to carry up the Missouri bank (which is steep with loose rocks), to wade up the shallow area river-left of the hole (at 2.1 feet it's mostly ankle-deep, but the foot-entrapment danger might be greater at higher levels), or to give it up and entertain yourself someplace else.  Photo by Bilbo Eades.







The rest of our trip was very enjoyable.  I become more fond of St. Louis every time I go there.  I think St. Louis and Memphis have much in common culturally and demographically, but St. Louis seems to have a little bit more of certain things that I love about Memphis.  Take architecture: St. Louis has hundreds and hundreds of grand brick homes from around the turn of the 20th century.  Many of them are in desperate need of restoration, but the number of them is impressive nevertheless.  Here in Memphis many such structures have been torn down or, as Martha pointed out, were never built because the building boom in St. Louis might have coincided with Memphis's loss of its charter in the wake of the yellow fever epidemic.

A good example is the supremely nifty place that Martha found for us to stay: a bed and breakfast called Casa Magnolia, located on Magnolia Avenue along the northern edge of Tower Grove Park.  It's a 1906-vintage home that the owners have restored beautifully.

I tend to think of bed-and-breakfast places being out in the country or in small towns, but I love the idea of having one in the heart of a big city like Casa Magnolia is.  Somebody here in Midtown Memphis ought to run something like that (and, in fact, somebody does, though it's not quite as grand as this).







Anyway, I'm not about to pick up and move away from Memphis--Memphis is my home, after all, and it's got some assets that St. Louis will never have--but I sure do enjoy visiting St. Louis.  I had a great time paddling my boat and watching the Cardinals take two victories from those adorably hapless Chicago Cubs.  Martha, meanwhile, got in some good contra dancing and painted the landscapes of the awesome Tower Grove Park.  And to top it all off, we indulged in some frozen custard at Ted Drewes, and that makes the trip worth it all by itself.