I got in my car Friday morning and began to drive east. My day ended in the San-Ran Motel in Robbinsville, North Carolina. The Cheoah River awaited down below Santeetlah Dam.
My plan was to meet Ruthie and Curtis, a couple from Atlanta I had met at the Gauley at the end of September, for a run of the river. But when I got up Saturday morning and walked outside to find a decent cell signal, I found a voice mail from them saying that the roof rack, with boats attached, had blown off their car on Highway 400, and they wouldn't be making it. So I went down to the putin to see who else might welcome my company. I found Ava Carr, a former Memphian whom I had last paddled with in the late 1990s, and I joined her and her two friends.
The Cheoah can be divided into a couple of distinct sections. The first several miles of the run are in a narrow riverbed that feels even narrower because of the vegetation that has grown there during the long periods when the river is dewatered. Since most of my whitewater friends have run the Ocoee River, I typically describe other rivers in terms of the Ocoee: if you take an average piece of the Ocoee, choke it down to about a third of its width, and increase the gradient by a few degrees, you've got this upper part of the Cheoah. Expect to spend most of your time weaving through long series of ledges with numerous rocks and holes sprinkled in.
Then you reach Bear Creek Falls, a drop with several obstructed lines, and the riverbed's character changes. Below Bear Creek the river becomes wider and, more significantly, much more cluttered with big rocks. Suddenly, picking out clean lines becomes more difficult. I have now run the Cheoah three times, and each time I have come off the river with busted-up knuckles from doing low braces off rocks in this section below Bear Creek.
But busted-up knuckles ain't gonna kill nobody. I had a good day of hard work and play on the Cheoah and it was great to see Ava again.
As I headed down the road away from the Cheoah, I raised Ruthie on the phone and learned that they had fixed their roof-rack problem, and would meet me Sunday morning for my very first run of the Tallulah Gorge.
The Tallulah River is located in Rabun County in the northeast corner of Georgia. I had been aware of the river's existence since I was a teenager working at a summer camp up in Brevard, NC, and I had driven right by the dam at the top of the gorge many times while in the area to run the nearby Chattooga River. But since neither the dam nor the gorge is visible from the highway, I had never actually laid eyes on the place.
In fact, the Tallulah (and the Cheoah, too, for that matter) has only recently become known to the greater paddling community. Several scenes of the movie "Deliverance" were shot in Tallulah Gorge in the early 1970s, but the riverbed otherwise lay dewatered until a coalition of paddling organizations began lobbying for scheduled dam realeases during the dam's relicensing process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the early 1990s. The result is that Georgia Power and Light now realeases water for paddlers during several weekends in April and November. There's an interesting account of a 1993 "exploratory" run in Tallulah Gorge here.
I made camp Saturday evening in Tallulah Gorge State Park on the river-left canyon rim. The next morning I met Ruthie and Curtis in the parking area next to the dam. A gate was open and water was spilling over the dam into the deep gorge below.
We hiked the path that runs beneath U.S. 441 and descended the long staircase into the gorge that was built when recreational releases began some fifteen years ago. I was immediately taken with the incredible beauty of the place and couldn't believe I had zoomed right by it in my car all those years. We put in and immediately had to run one of the trickier rapids in the gorge, Last Step (so called, I suppose, because it's the "last step" of that long staircase). Then we ran Tanner's Boof and found ourselves on the brink of one of the Southeast's most famous rapids, Oceana Falls.
A paddler must make many decisions on a whitewater river, and "to run" vs. "to portage" is one of the most basic. As I stood on the bank and regarded the very impressive rapid that is Oceana, several things were going through my head. Certainly, I was evaluating my ability to make the crux move, which in this case involved putting my boat in just the right spot at the top of the rapid and then simply hanging on for the rest of the drop. I was also thinking about the hole at the bottom and the likelihood that I would be stuck there--not really an issue of personal injury, as there is nothing but a large pool below, but rather of the hassle and demoralization of having to rescue myself and my gear should I come out of my boat. Finally, there was the knowledge that later, whenever I would tell somebody I had run Tallulah Gorge, his or her first question would be, "Did you run Oceana?" I don't like to admit that I care what others think of me as a paddler, but the reality is that I sort of do, and I would bet that most other good paddlers are the same way to some degree.
In the end, I decided to run it. I chose the "safest" line on the far left (the choice of most other boaters on the river), and hit the spot I wanted to hit at the top. The rest of the run went by so fast that it's all a blur in my memory. At the bottom I was upside down, but not stuck in the hole, and after rolling up I was done with this particular milestone.
Oceana Falls was by far the part of Tallulah Gorge that I had heard the most about, but as we continued on downriver, I discovered that there was much more excitement in store. Most of the run consists of read-as-you-go whitewater that is really, really fun. I did have one scary moment at the bottom of a rapid known as "Tat": without paying attention to what Ruthie and Curtis were doing, I went ahead and ran the drop on the far left side, and found myself being sucked into an undercut rock at the bottom. My boat got flipped, and before I could even attempt to roll I was out of it. As I swam underwater for some five seconds, I figured I was in a dire situation until I saw daylight above me. When I broke the surface, I was well downstream of the rock and my boat was floating upright a few feet away. It was the coziest I had ever gotten with an undercut rock and I don't care ever to repeat the experience if I can help it.
The Tallulah Gorge run ends the same way its neighbor, the Chattooga, ends: with a paddle out on Lake Tugaloo. It was good to get back together with Ruthie and Curtis and I hope to do so again before long. And it was good to spend some more of this fall in the mountains. I love my home in the lower Mississippi basin, but a change of scenery can recharge one's spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment