Monday photo feature

The father-daughter team of Mike Herbert and Savanna Wright finish up a race on the Tennessee River at Hales Bar Marina near Haletown, Tennessee, on Saturday.  Mike and Savanna, long-time friends of My Training Blog by Elmore, usually look a lot crisper and in-sync than this, but seeing as how they've just paddled almost 32 miles with very little help from any current, they can be forgiven if their form looks a bit frayed here.  They paddled well enough to claim first place in the mixed tandem surfski class.  Photo by Deb Boyles Glover.

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Paddling what little water we've got on a cool weekend

I'd almost forgotten what a cloudy day looked like, but yesterday refreshed my memory.  In addition to overcast skies we had a brisk north wind and a much cooler temperature.  So I wasn't in the mood for any surfing as I embarked on yesterday's paddle, and it turned out there was no barge traffic on the Mississippi anyway.  It was just as well, because I felt tired and achy in the boat and I needed a steady session to work those feelings out.  My quest for better rotation from the hips continues: such mechanics harness more power from the legs and take stress off the arms and shoulders, and I can tell my arms feel a lot better when I'm doing it well.

This morning the temperature was even a few degrees lower, but the sun was out and the wind was calm.  I didn't feel like a world-beater but I did at least feel better than yesterday.  I had a good 60-minute paddle on a river that was again mostly deserted.

About two-thirds of my dock is now on the ground.  I'm having to carry my boat around to another dock that still has access to the water.  The river level continues to hang out just above -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge, and the forecast says it will more or less stay there.  That's a very, very low level, but not quite as low as the record -12 feet we saw last year.  So far I haven't seen any mention in the local or national news about the situation on the lower Mississippi.  The floodwaters from Hurricane Helene didn't prevent low water here, but they at least bought us some time, and I'm hoping wetter weather will settle into the watershed soon so we can avoid another record-setting year.

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Warm weather fun

This week we've had plentiful sunshine and near-record-high temperatures for late October.  I've had ideas floating around in my head about moving to some dry-land training for a while--lots of leg and core exercises, mainly--but as long as it's as warm as it's been it seems to make sense to stay in the boat a little longer.

I paddled for 60 minutes both Tuesday and yesterday.  Both days I found conveniently-placed barge traffic out on the Mississippi and tried to do some surfing.  The waves weren't especially easy to catch, and I wonder if the low water level has something to do with that--it's currently -9.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  And the towboat pilot I tried to surf behind yesterday was a real grump who apparently doesn't like anybody having fun while he has to work.  He gave me five (5) angry blasts on his horn.  If I could have talked to him, I would have made the same point I made here a couple of months ago: as long as it's okay for him to churn up waves on our river, it's okay for me to go out and try to surf them.

Anyway, I probably won't have many more days of favorable conditions for surfing out there.  This warm weather won't last forever, and the Mississippi's water gets very cold in the winter and I won't have much desire to get wet out there until late next spring.

I also prefer warm weather for bike riding.  I planned to ride Wednesday morning, but I discovered my bike had a flat tire and all the spare tubes I had required patching before they'd be usable.  Yes, I know a lot of riders just throw out punctured tubes and replace them with brand-new ones, but I have a hard time throwing a tube in the garbage when one pin-prick hole is the only thing wrong with it.  Anyway... instead of riding, I spent Wednesday morning patching all my spare tubes.  That pushed the riding back to this morning, when I took advantage of another lovely warm day to take the Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.

It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be some ten degrees cooler than it's been the last several days.  But it'll still be nice for paddling.

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Monday photo feature

Here we have a before-and-after pair of photos--well, actually it's after-and-before, since the newer picture is on top.  We're looking at the famous Gorilla rapid on the Green River near Saluda, North Carolina.

When I was first learning to paddle at summer camp in nearby Brevard, the Green was one of the staples of the canoeing program--not the part of it that includes Gorilla, but a section a little ways downriver.  Here we had a lovely Class II stream that was ideal for doing lots of ferries and eddy turns, and also for learning the right way to swim in a river.  Green Cove Road ran alongside the entire run.

The putin for this section was the Fishtop access.  To get there we had to ride in the camp bus, canoe trailer pulled behind, down a harrowing set of switchbacks.  Seeing as how we essentially were descending the Blue Ridge Escarpment, it stands to reason that the river must have some steep gradient upstream of Fishtop.  When I was a camper back in the early 1980s we occasionally heard gossip about "unrunnable" waterfalls up there, and an old guidebook said something about rock climbing equipment being required for a paddler to get down that section.  But honestly, we didn't give it a whole lot of thought.  To us, the Green was a place to go and work on the basics.

By the late 1980s, techniques and materials had advanced enough that a few pioneering paddlers began to believe that this section of the Green above Fishtop, known as The Narrows, might not be unrunnable after all.  Then they went in there and proved it, running every last one of the rapids, including the raucous Gorilla and the frightening Sunshine.  Before long a couple of videos, Green Summer and Gorilla, were commercially available on VHS cassette.  Steep creeking had truly arrived.  With Lake Summit Dam providing frequent flows, more and more paddlers sought to get in on the action.

I have never run The Narrows of the Green myself.  I can cite a short list of reasons, and yes, fear of the place is one of them.  I simply couldn't imagine myself running something as bodacious as Gorilla.  But since the late 80s many people piled up dozens and even hundreds of runs on The Narrows and could do it in their sleep.  Since the early 2000s there even has been an annual race on the Green Narrows.

The Green is one of the rivers that got positively hammered by Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago.  Green Cove Road, including the switchbacks, sustained tremendous damage, and many houses along the road were swept away.  I've seen some photos and video footage of this section of river that was such a part of my early paddling education, and it looks completely scoured out.  It remains to be seen whether it will ever again be the ideal whitewater training ground that it was before.

Upstream in The Narrows, the rapids have changed radically.  The word on the street is that nothing is the same as before.  Pictured above is the "new" Gorilla rapid on top and the "old" Gorilla (during the 2017 edition of the annual race) on the bottom.  The camera angles aren't quite the same, and the upper photo is closer in to the rapid than the lower photo, but it's pretty clear that an impressive amount of rock got washed away from the river-left bank.  The early assessment of the few paddlers who have ventured into the gorge since the storm seems to be that Gorilla is no longer runnable.  I won't be surprised if somebody puts that to the test before long, however.

Both the photos above are screen-grabs from videos on You Tube.  The top one is from a drone video posted by a Wesley Shelmire, and the bottom one is from a video on the Kayak Session TV channel.

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Healing and getting back in motion

The last time I posted here I mentioned I was trying to get a response from my doctor's office about an X-ray I'd had taken.  They finally got back to me, a full seven days after the X-ray was shot, to tell me there was no sign of a fracture.  That was nice to know, though I sure would have appreciated getting the information in a more timely fashion.  I asked them if the image shed any light on my continued coughing, and they said no.  It's now been more than a month since I first got sick, and while I think the coughing is getting ever-so-gradually less frequent, I'm still having some occasional fits of it.  It's at its worst when I get up in the morning, when I'm expelling all the gunk that had collected overnight.  My friend Rob who rents the little studio apartment in the rear of my building told me that he's been praying for me because he's heard me coughing so much.  I genuinely found that touching.

Since learning that I had no broken bones in my chest area I've been easing myself back into some physical exercise.  I did a couple of 50-minute paddles toward the end of the week before last, week and paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday and Friday of this past week.  My stamina was probably down a tad, but in all I felt reasonably good in the boat.

I woke up this morning with an inexplicable sharp pain in my left wrist--I don't recall doing anything yesterday that might have caused such an ailment.  I went on down to the river hoping for the best, and was relieved to find that I could paddle with no real pain.  I did another 60 minutes, and even got to do some barge-wake surfing.  The waves had a long wavelength and a small amplitude and seemed to require a bit more speed than I could generate, but I did get a couple of okay rides.  The best thing was that I felt good after doing some hard sprints--a sign that maybe I'm getting some stamina back.  By the time I finished paddling my wrist seemed to feel somewhat better, so maybe it just needed some exercise to loosen it up.

Wednesday morning I did a 75-minute bike ride.  I went out the Greater Memphis Greenline to its junction with the Wolf River Greenway, and then rode down the Greenway to where it makes a loop just south of where it passes under Walnut Grove Road.  I traversed the loop and retraced my path back home.  I felt like I'd lost a bit of fitness on the bike too, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so when I had almost nothing left in my legs.  At least there's plenty of time to get that back.

How is the Mississippi River doing these days?  Well, in a post several weeks ago I said that the catastrophic floodwaters in the North Carolina mountains "might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row."  And might is the key word here.  The lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded is -12.04 feet on October 17 of last year.  This fall the level had been below -10 feet before the floodwaters brought it up to about 6.5 feet a little over two weeks ago.  That's almost a 17-foot rise, coming mostly from a small area in North Carolina.  Now that surge of water has moved through, and the level is back down below -8 feet.  By the time I got down to the river on Friday my dock was starting to run aground:

The current forecast has the level holding steady for the next couple of weeks, and the hope is that it will stay above super-low levels until the wetter season settles into the Midwest.  "Super-low" water makes things tough for the barge-shipping industry, and its struggles can eventually ripple through the greater economy; it also causes damage to our marinas and other infrastructure that local river users depend on.

The weather has been just plain gorgeous lately, with plenty of sunshine.  We had our first cool spell of the season in the middle of last week, with the temperature just barely reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  But it's warming back up now and we're expected to have highs in the 80s for the next week.

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Monday photos feature

Yes, it's "photos" plural this week because I've got a number of them to share.

The photo above, a screen-grab from WVLT-Knoxville footage, shows Interstate 40 where the eastbound lanes collapsed into the Pigeon River.  The North Carolina Department of Transportation is currently saying that this part of I-40 will be closed until September 2025.  I won't be surprised if that date gets pushed back as time goes on.

I understand that this destruction is located at about Mile 4 in North Carolina.  The putin for the main dam-controlled section of the Pigeon is right at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.  So that means this damage is about four miles upstream of that putin.

Back in the mid-1990s several slalom races were held on the Pigeon right at the state line, including an installment of the old Champion International Whitewater Series in 1996.  I shot this photo of the C2 team of David Hepp and Barry Kennon in that race.  That's David in the stern and Barry in the bow:

I competed in that race too, and I've also run the section of the Pigeon from the state line to Hartford, Tennessee, a number of times.  In this photo, taken by Mike Davis in 1993, I'm on a camp trip paddling with a camper named Billy Treadway:

On another Pigeon run, I'm in my old Gyramax C1 practicing my roll:

Another river that flooded last week was the French Broad.  The French Broad has its headwaters in the vicinity of Rosman, North Carolina, and flows north through Asheville; it crosses the state line into Tennessee north of where the Pigeon does.  Communities along the French Broad that received significant damage include the towns of Hot Springs, Marshall, and Asheville, and the Biltmore Estate just outside Asheville.  Rion Smith took this photo of me during a 1992 trip on the French Broad where it flows by the Biltmore Estate.  I'm putting on the sort of stern expression that befits such an important man as the head of a summer camp canoeing program:

In the summer of 1994, Clay Barbee shot this photo of me as I tried to get enders in Frank Bell's Rapid.  This rapid is on the French Broad a couple of miles upstream of Hot Springs:

A couple of miles above Frank Bell's Rapid, Big Laurel Creek flows into the French Broad.  My friend Amelia drove by the putin for Big Laurel last week, and she told me it didn't look like it got quite the amount of flooding that the French Broad did.  Here's a shot of me running Stairsteps rapid on Big Laurel in the spring of 1994.  Alfred Thompson took the photo:

These photos represent just a small sample of all the paddling I've done in the mountains of western North Carolina in times when a hurricane seemed the least of the region's worries.  From what I hear, some of the rapids in these rivers have now been completely rearranged.  Whatever the case, I hope that in good time, once the rivers have settled into their altered courses and the region has had a chance to recover from this meteorological disaster, paddlers will once again enjoy carefree days on these playful streams.

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Mountain devastation makes my troubles seem small

I decided to go back to the doctor on Wednesday because of both the injury to my chest area and my continued coughing and chest congestion.  My regular doctor is out of the office on leave right now, so I've been seeing other doctors in the practice.  The one I saw Wednesday was upbeat about my coughing situation, saying he thought it should run its course in a few more days.  He ordered a chest X-ray to determine whether something's broken in my ribcage/sternum area.  My doctor's office has its own X-ray lab, so getting an X-ray is usually a quick and simple process there.  Unfortunately, the office's in-house X-ray technician had left for the day (even though it wasn't even noon yet), so the doctor had to send me up the street to the minor emergency diagnostic center that's owned by the same corporation that owns his practice.  When I got there I found myself in line behind a couple of people, so I ended up sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour.  Finally they got me in and out of the lab, and so all that was left was for them to send the image back to the doctor I had seen, and for him to call me to discuss the results.

Thursday came and went with no call from the doctor.  So Friday morning I called his office, and when I got their voice mail I left a message asking them to remind him that he owed me a call.  By mid afternoon Friday I hadn't heard a word, so I called again and got a person on the phone this time.  The person told me that because it was after 3 PM, the doctor would most likely not call me until Monday.

And so I'm pretty angry with my doctor's office right now.  The nicest thing I can say about this doctor is that he's not the first I've met for whom customer service is not a high priority.  The upshot is that I'm refraining from paddling this weekend because I still don't know if something is broken in my chest area.  It's frustrating, but maybe it's not the worst thing for me at this moment.  Seeing as how I'm still not entirely recovered from that illness I had, maybe I just need to chill out for a few more days and give my body a chance to get right again.

My friend Amelia, with whom I paddled up at the Gauley last month, paid me a visit Thursday because she was in this area as part of a job.  The main reason I bring this up is that she lives in east Tennessee and works for one of the rafting companies on the Pigeon River, one of the rivers that flooded catastrophically a week ago, and she shared some first-hand information on what's happening over there.  Her raft company is located on the bank of the Pigeon in the town of Hartford, pretty much all of which was badly flooded.  Flood-driven debris knocked a hole in a wall of her company's building, and a lot of the gear was washed away.  The whole place was filled with mud, and the building was destabilized and will need structural repair.  The good news, said Amelia, is that the entire community--neighbors, church groups, raft guides, everybody--came out and started helping one another as soon as the floodwaters had receded.  She said it took just a few hours to get all the mud scraped out of the building, and the company even recovered some of its rafts from a little ways downstream.

Hartford is just one of the towns that experienced major flooding.  A few towns were all but washed off the map.  If I'm interpreting what I've seen in photos correctly, the entire business district of Chimney Rock collapsed into the Rocky Broad River, and many buildings in the town of Marshall were completely destroyed by the flooding French Broad.  The common thread in every town that got flooded appears to be mud: a thick layer of mud contaminated with a whole cocktail of pollutants including petroleum products and raw sewage.  Every street must be scraped of that stuff to be passable for cars like my little Toyota Corolla.

Water and electricity are out all over the region, and it's going to take a long time to get them up and running again because the roads must be rebuilt/repaired before the utility trucks can get in to replace damaged lines.

So it's a mess over there.  I'm grateful for all the organizations, from FEMA to local governments to nonprofits to individuals with skills and equipment, who are over there helping with the cleanup.  If you can't offer help in person, I hope you'll consider donating some money as long as you're smart about it.  So far I've donated to several people or entities who are known to me first- or second-hand.

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Catastrophe in the mountains to the east, and not much paddling here at home

Times are tough for a part of the world that's near and dear to me.  The mountains of western North Carolina are where I fell in love with paddlesports at summer camp some 43 years ago, and were also home to a crafts school (no longer in operation since the retirement of its director) that was the foundation of my development as a woodworker.  That region was positively walloped late last week by Hurricane Helene, which had already perpetrated significant damage as it moved north through Florida and Georgia.

Central characters in the story were rivers I have spent untold hours paddling and exploring: the French Broad, the Green, the Pigeon, the Tuckasegee, the Chattooga, and the Nolichucky, along with various tributary creeks.  Floodwaters did horrific damage to familiar towns like Asheville, Marshall, Hot Springs, Erwin, Chimney Rock, Bryson City, Hartford, Boone, and Greeneville.

The storm exposed just how tenuous the access to many of those communities can be.  If a street is closed here in my grid-patterned city, all you have to do is go around the block to get to a house on that street.  That's not how it works in the narrow valleys and hollers of the Appalachians, where there's typically just one road in.  In some cases bridges or culverts were washed out, leaving entire communities utterly isolated.  Right now even the big city of Asheville is all but impossible to drive to because all of the major interstates and U.S. highways suffered damage.  I learned just this morning that a friend of mine managed to drive from Asheville to her home near Gatlinburg via a convoluted network of state roads in Madison County (NC) and Greene County (TN), probably taking hours longer than normal.

I expect my camp will have limited choices on where it can take canoe trips next summer.  As of now I know that at least two of its bread-and-butter rivers, the Green and the Pigeon, have suffered major damage to their access roads that will probably take many months to repair.  I'm just glad this catastrophe took place early in the camp's offseason; if it had happened in, say, April or May, the camp might have had to cancel its summer sessions because the region's infrastructure, on which it relies for everything from transporting campers to bringing in food and other goods and services, was in ruins.

If there's a bright side to this whole episode, it's that it might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row.  Just a week ago the river was more than ten feet below zero on the Memphis gauge; the record low of -12.04 feet was set just a year ago.  Since then the water has come up to three and a half feet above zero, and is predicted to keep rising to a little over six feet by late this week.  That's not really a high level at all, but it's high enough that the commercial shipping companies can operate comfortably, and that's the main reason those record-low levels have made the national news for the last couple of years.

And yes, much of that water is coming from western North Carolina.  The French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers all flow into east Tennessee and eventually form the Tennessee River.  The Tuckasegee, meanwhile, is a tributary of the Little Tennessee, which also flows across the state line and feeds into the Tennessee.  The Tennessee, of course, flows past Knoxville and Chattanooga, dips down into northern Alabama and Mississippi, re-enters Tennessee and flows northward into Kentucky, and finally confluences with the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi a short while later at Cairo, Illinois.  So my river right here at Memphis includes water from some of those rivers I grew to love as a camper in North Carolina.

Speaking of that river here at Memphis... this morning I went down to the riverfront to paddle my surfski for the first time in almost a month.  If you've been following this blog lately, then you know that during that month I made a trip to the Gauley River, then came home and got sick for a while, then did my annual demonstration at the crafts fair here.  I definitely wasn't planning a serious training session today: as much as anything, I just wanted to check on my boat and make sure all was well down at the dock.  The truth is that my physical health is not entirely back to normal.  I don't really feel sick anymore, but I've got a lot of chest congestion and I'm having some fairly frequent coughing fits.  And there's still some swelling in that injured area of my chest (courtesy of my tablesaw).

Once I was in the boat this morning, I started out gingerly, and the session ended up being even briefer than I'd planned.  There was discomfort and stuff moving around in my chest--whether there are actual broken bones in there, or just soft tissue moving weirdly, I'm not sure.  I might have to make another trip to my doctor, especially if this coughing still hasn't run its course in another day or two.  I expect she'll want to take an X-ray, both to look for broken ribs/sternum and to gain some insight into what the deal is with all this coughing.

So I was in the boat for just 20 minutes today.  I ended up doing a litter pick-up, by way of keeping the paddling intensity low.  And there was plenty of litter out there in the harbor, both because of the rising water level and because Hurricane Helene sent a good bit of rain to this region, too.  There was much more trash than I could ever fit into my surfski's footwell, so I focused on aluminum cans, which seem to be the most viably recyclable items these days.  I collected a bucketful, and that didn't make even the slightest noticeable dent in the floating trash, but at least I can say I'm a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.

Whether I get back in the boat anytime soon remains to be seen.  If in fact something is broken, I'll have to take some more weeks off to let it heal.  I hope to do some bike riding and other general-fitness activity to tide myself over in the meantime.

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