There is a chain of lakes that me and my sister drove by all the time. We had often talked about exploring them, but we had never actually done it. One day we decided to finally do it, and we packed up a canoe and some supplies and set off to see how far we could get. We could see on Google Maps that there were a bunch of lakes and ponds connected by a river, and we wanted to see how far we could get just by canoeing along the river and through the lakes.
My sister canoeing on one of the lakes.
It started off easy. There was a park we could launch the canoe from, and we were able to get on the water without any issues. The first part of the river was pretty calm and easy to navigate, and we were able to make good progress. There was two pretty cool tunnels we got to go through to pass under a highway, which is always fun, as long as you can avoid the rocks that are often hidden in there. After just a short while on these long ponds, we came to our first challenge.
There was a couple of small islands and a rocky area where to water became shallow and dropped over a bit of a lip. We had to carefully navigate through the shallow rocks, while also being mindful of the current, which was weak, but strong enough to pull us into the wrong direction if we weren't careful. We had to use our paddles to push off of the rocks and keep us moving in the right direction, while also trying to avoid getting stuck on any of the rocks. Once we were passed that though we were once again pretty free on the water. By now we had put enough distance between us and the highway that we couldn't hear any traffic, and we could now hear the sound of the water trickling around rocks slowly and birds chirping in the trees. It was a really peaceful and serene moment, and I felt really grateful to be out there experiencing it.
After a bit more paddling we came to another rocky area, but this one was a lot more intense. The river had a lot more of a current, and there were a lot more rocks, and they were bigger. Leading up to this area there were some narrow bits with some low hanging trees. WE had quickly discovered that these trees had a lot of spiders in them, and they didn't mind falling into the boat or onto us. Im pretty sure that the spiders ware completely harmless, and I don't really mind spiders, but I do mind having them on me unexpectedly.
A view of the rocky river we needed to traverse.
So with that in mind we cam to this area with lots of rocks and it was pretty steep. Unfortunately it didn't seem like we were going to be able to canoe down it, but we did have rope. We used the rope to carefully lower the canoe down through the rocks. It was a little sketchy at times, as one person had to hold the canoe and lower it down while the other waited to receive it. We were hopping from rock to rock, trying to be careful as most of the rocks were wet and mossy. There were a bunch of trees along the sides with the aforementioned spiders, so we had to be careful to avoid those as well. Even though it was tricky, it was also really fun to have a bit of a puzzle of getting through it.
We managed to get through this steep area after quite a while, and we were pretty proud of ourselves for figuring it out. We arrived a a small little pond on the other side, and we had to make a choice. We could see that in front of us was more of the steep rocky river. The issue was that we were starting to run out of time. This was only meant to be a day trip and we had left later than we had planned. Since we knew how long it had taken us to get to this point, we knew that if we went through the rocky river we were going to be paddling in the dark, which is not something we wanted to do. We decided to turn around and head back the way we came, which was a bit of a bummer, but it was also nice to know that we had made it through the rocky river, and we could always come back another time to explore more of the river and see where it takes us.