Washed out of the mountains

I'm online for the first time since Monday morning, so it's time to catch up on what's been happening this week.  On Sunday I went and did my typical paddle for the day after a race: an easy 60 minutes on Fontana Reservoir.

In the early 1940s the Tennessee Valley Authority built Fontana Dam on the Little Tennessee River a few miles above where it flows from North Carolina into Tennessee.  The result is Fontana Reservoir, and if you look at this body of water on a map you'll see that it's not the sort of vast expanse we're used to in my part of the country.  Here in this mountainous terrain the impoundment backs up into all the many tributary watersheds, creating hundreds of fingers and tentacles.  A paddler (or any other boater) can easily get lost in the maze.  As I paddled on Sunday I had to make myself stop from time to time, and turn around to study where I'd come from.  As you can gather from reading this post, I have made it back to tell the tale.

With an entire week before my final race on this trip--the USCA Nationals up at Dubuque, Iowa--I had no particular itinerary for the early part of this week, and I considered spending another day or two in the mountains.  But Sunday evening some heavy rain moved into the area and chased me into my tent early, and it was still pouring down when I woke up the next morning.  There's nothing like some inclement weather to make one desire a change of scenery.  I quickly broke camp during a moment when the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and headed west.  Surely, I thought, the storm system and I would eventually part company as I drove.

It appeared that we'd done so by the time I was in middle Tennessee, and I made camp in Rock Island State Park east of McMinnville.  But no sooner did I clip the last corner of my tent's fly in place than the rain came back with a vengeance.  I dove into the tent and sat forlornly as the drops hammered overhead.  The rain finally ended as darkness fell, but by then there wasn't much to do but hit the hay and hope my soggy environs would begin to dry out the next day.

I'll tell you some more later.