Scheduled to launch from Lee's Ferry, Arizona, on August 27, I'm making my way across this nation.
I left home mid-morning Friday, and spent that night in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, a couple of hundred yards from the Oklahoma state line. Yesterday morning I got up and had breakfast, and then crossed into Oklahoma and went a few miles south to the WOKA Whitewater Center.
It had been one of my objectives to tune up for the Grand Canyon by doing some whitewater paddling while crossing the state of Oklahoma. That might seem like a funny thing to say, since Oklahoma is not exactly known for its abundance of whitewater streams. But it does have Riversport OKC in Oklahoma City, an artificial whitewater course that has hosted national-level whitewater slalom competitions and will be the venue for no less than the Olympic Games in 2028.
Several weeks ago I visited the Riversport website hoping to find a reasonably cheap way to drop in there and paddle for an hour or so. Sadly, there didn't seem to be any such accommodation. The fee schedule encourages people to sign up for annual memberships and seasonal passes and stuff like that, and the cheapest option seemed to be a $60 day pass--more than I wanted to pay for just a quick session during a long day of traveling.
I started looking for other offerings along my route to Arizona, and that's when I found WOKA.
WOKA, which stands for "Waters of Oklahoma and Arkansas," is located next to a dam on the Illinois River (a different river from the one that flows in the state of Illinois). A side channel has been constructed that runs downhill from the surface of the reservoir above the dam to the level of the river below the dam, as shown in this image from the WOKA website:
The river flows from right to left in this photo. The channel's developers used the gradient to construct a few whitewater features, and it has become a popular park-and-play spot for paddlers in the northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma region. The Illinois River is spring-fed, assuring a minimum level of flow even in the summer months when the natural rivers and creeks of the Ozarks have dried up.
I put my boat on the water at WOKA yesterday morning hoping to make up for my lack of whitewater paddling in the last year. Even after all those drills I put myself through at home this summer, it quickly became apparent that I was rusty. There's no substitute for having genuine whitewater (even the man-made kind) under your boat. I spent an hour surfing and trying various moves on the canal's drops, and by the end of it my confidence had risen markedly. I'm glad I invested the time, so that I won't be putting on the Colorado River completely cold. This photo that I shot of one of the other paddlers gives an idea of the kind of whitewater one finds at WOKA. This is "Drop 1" on the map above:
Interstate 40 runs from Memphis all the way to Flagstaff, so it would have made sense for me to drive that road all the way. But getting to WOKA required that I make a bit of a detour up into the northeastern portion of Oklahoma. So when I finished paddling yesterday, I found myself poring over the map for the best way to get back to I-40. I had competing desires: to make efficient progress in my drive to Arizona versus to see some interesting sights. The route I chose probably leaned toward the latter desire even though I think it added the smallest amount of distance to my overall journey. Basically, I took a bunch of secondary roads across largely-rural northern Oklahoma before finally slanting southwestward into the Texas panhandle to re-join I-40 at Amarillo.
The going was slow at times: in almost every town I had to reduce my speed to 30 or even 25 miles per hour, and getting stuck behind slow drivers on two-lane roads was the norm. But I generally enjoyed watching the landscape roll by, making its transition from the deciduous forests of the Mid South and lower Midwest to the open grasslands of the Great Plains. Back in the 1990s I drove out to the Rocky Mountains to paddle whitewater every summer, and it was the attitude of my friends and me that one must traverse the Plains as rapidly and painlessly as possible en route to "the good stuff" in the mountains. But the truth is, I like the Great Plains. I wouldn't want to live there or anything, but I enjoy taking the time to observe what life is like for the people who do live there. And contrary to many people's impression, the Plains are not flat as a pancake; the terrain is actually quite rolling.
What's more, my involvement in open-water paddling in a surfski has made me appreciate the paddling possibilities in the Plains. The wind can blow relentlessly there, and back in July of 2021 I had a sure-enough downwind session on the Missouri River where it crosses from North Dakota into South Dakota.
However, my mood was darkening a bit as I passed through the little towns on the final approach to Amarillo. Those towns were rather depressing, with lots of boarded-up storefronts and virtually nothing of interest going on that I could see. It was getting on into suppertime, and from what I could tell, the restaurants and diners and cafes these towns once had have long since gone out of business. I had to go all the way into Amarillo, the urban center of the Texas panhandle, to find a place to eat.
I bunked for the night in Amarillo, and now I'm enjoying a more relaxing morning than I had yesterday, when I wanted to get my paddling in at WOKA and then cover some miles on the road. Today my goal is Gallup, New Mexico: it's less than six hours from here, and since I'll gain an hour when I cross into the Mountain Time zone, I should get there at a very reasonable time of day. From there, it's less than three hours to Flagstaff, so tomorrow I should get to Flagstaff around midday and have time to visit with my trip's outfitter and start making final preparations for my expedition through the Grand Canyon.
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