Wyalusing State Park and the Mighty Mississippi

Pair of Eagles

This past weekend, Ali and I joined a ton of fellow Hoofers on the annual Fall Colors paddling trip.  We head over (this year a week or two too late for peak colors) to Wyalusing State Park, where the Wisconsin River runs into the Mississippi river.  (It's on the Wisconsin-Iowa border, about halfway between the northwestern corner of Illinois and the southeastern corner of Minnesota.)  Wyalusing is about 2 hours away from Madison, and there are some really pretty bluffs that surround the confluence.

Overlooking the last of the Wisconsin River
 (Iowa is the dark ridge on the right)

We headed out of town Friday night with 19 canoes and 1 homemade sea kayak.  Ali and I ended up in the backseat of this tiny Geo hatchback that had too much gear (and a canoe) even after dumping a bunch of personal gear into another car that had the same departure time as us.  The ride was cramped but not too problematic.

We got to the park after sun down, and set up our tents at a group site across from the Boy Scouts.  There was a pretty decent pile of firewood thanks to the earlier group of Hoofers, and we had a solid fire well into the evening.  Unfortunately, there were a couple guys who insisted on poking the fire (not really managing the fire, just constantly trying to break coals off of logs and generate fountains of sparks).  They were successful in their endeavors - I got a bunch of embers burning holes through my gear and one 2cm coal that landed in the wrist of my jacket.  Mind you, I was about 6 feet back from the fire.  Needless to say, many people around the fire ring were none to happy.

We headed to the tents just after midnight and woke to an incredible amount of condensation (a bunch of the newer folk thought it had rained overnight).  We had some awesome fruit + couscous before packing up and going for a brief hike.  The walk was about a mile's worth of scenic overlooks and neat caves in/on the bluffs.  There's some tradition of trying to fit as many people as possible into this one cave.  This year, the club got about 20 people in, but that did leave plenty of claustrophobic people (including me) out.
Just before noon, we packed up the cars and drove to the put in on the Wisconsin River.  Once the cars were unloaded and lunch (sandwiches) was finished, the drivers went off for a ridiculously long shuttle.  Granted, they were dropping off a lot of safety cars in case of trouble/hypothermia/slow-goings, but 2+ hours seemed excessive.  Everybody left at the put in had a lot of time for frisbee and old camp-style games.
We finally got on the water around 3 and had smooth sailing to our sandbar/island/peninsula/shore (depending on water level) campsite for the night.

With nearly 40 people, we had more than enough to get dinner going (tortellini, salad, and garlic bread) and get a massive pile of firewood.  Several years back, the group on Fall Colors had used a downed tree for the fire (long and narrow = plenty of room for lots of people), so we gathered a ton of really large pieces of wood.  Though our biggest tree was used as a bench, there was still a huge area dedicated to the fire.  Did I mention a sign at the put-in said no ground fires were allowed...   yeah.  One of the guys had a two-handed saw that we used to get some of the larger downed wood into pieces that could be carried by 2-4 people.  It was pretty awesome getting to help operate the saw.

Note our small wood pile

Small starter fire

By dinner time, everybody had worked up an appetite.  We had a giant propane-tank-fueled burner and an industrial-sized pot for the pasta.  Two coleman two-burners were being used for the sauce.  Our kitchen set up was pretty impressive and really useful considering the number of people we had to feed.   We got our food right around dusk.  The rest of the evening was just relaxing by the (huge) fire, chatting, checking out stars in a monocular, and sleeping.

Day two started at a more leisurely pace (read as:  half the group was too ill-rested to do anything but nap the first quarter of the day).  We had another vat of breakfast, some really sub-par coffee, packed up, and floated downstream.  The weather was great for our two days of paddling (especially considering that the weekend was flanked by cold, rainy days).  There were a ton of eagles out, and there was enough sun reflecting off the water to make me squint half of the day.  We unintentionally divided into willing-to-paddle and napping-on-river early in the day, and it wasn't until lunch (on a sandbar, probably on the entering edge of Wyalusing Park) that we got everybody together and ready for some paddling.

Lunch!!

After more sandwiches/cookies/fruit, we got back on the Wisconsin and headed down onto the Mississippi. We had been warned about barge traffic, and Ali and I had been set as a flank boat (to keep novices close to shore and further from the navigation channel), but we didn't see anything larger than a standard motor boat.  There was a really pretty ridge on the Iowa side of the river, but that tapered off pretty quickly.  The Mississippi was super, super choppy, and I'm really not sure what was generating the waves.  There was a little wind, but it was not that severe of a headwind.

Herding folks on to the Mississippi

A mile down the Mississippi, we turned back into an inlet and headed up a "lake" to a State Park take-out.  The sun was starting to dip near the trees, but the water was nice and calm.  We had a relaxing ride to the cars, a long stretch of cleaning/packing/waiting for the shuttle, and then it was home to our storage facility to unpack.

Kremlin Section of the Menominee + the Red - (nearly) Last Call for Whitewater

This past weekend, Hoofers had their whitewater version of the Fall Colors paddling trip.  Though the water was low, we did get some beautiful weather and peak colors.  Friday night, we got out of Madison in a super-timely manner, and most of the group was up in Hooferland before 11pm!  (Hooferland is a small strip of land that the outing club owns up in northern Wisconsin - complete with tent sites, a fire ring, a privy, and plenty of nearby rivers.)  We had a pretty nice fire going by the time everybody found their way up, and everybody stayed up well into the evening.

Morning in Hooferland

 Quiver Falls aka The Kremlin Section on the Menominee River

Right of the Island

 Saturday morning, we crawled out of the tents, grabbed oatmeal/bagels/fruit and coffee for breakfast, packed PB&Js for lunch, and headed east toward the U.P.  It took us a while to figure out the right way to the put-in, but eventually we made it to the Menominee River.  The Menominee straddles the border between Wisconsin and Michigan, and there are several park and play spots where you can do laps on a short bit of a rapid.

 This section was contained by DNR land, and there were some nice dirt roads giving us access to the river. The stretch itself probably wasn't much over a quarter mile, but there were two different channels that were split by a large island.  Since there were some newbies, we scouted everything, and ran in a pretty organized/pretty downstream manner.  We only managed to get 3 runs in with the confused directions and the scouting, but there were some baby surfs to be had.

 The first two laps, we stayed on the right side of the island.  There were some boulder gardens and wave trains, but nothing all that tough and nothing great for play (except for maybe the middle of the run).  All the experienced paddlers had 2-3 less experienced folks to lead, so there was little in the way of working or playing the river.

Scouting the Rapid

 The third lap (in the left channel) was much more fun.  There was one straightforward drop and curve with a bigger play wave and a cool span of a cascade off to the side of the runnable water.  We stopped after the first drop for a bit, but several of the less-experienced boaters got into the wave and ended up swimming.

 Just down from the wave, the river split around some smaller islands, forming two distinct channels.  The one on the right was pretty narrow, twisty, and an otherwise straight shot.  The one on river left was wider, and though it offered more options, it also offered a lot of rocks.  I went left, and though I didn't hit the line I was hoping for, it was a pretty fun rapid.  I definitely would not have minded running the left side of the river a couple more times.

 Though we knew we ought to take out shortly and get back to camp before dusk, we stayed at the bottom of the left channel for a while.  A few more people had swims, and I got to work on boat-over-boat rescues (which I've been wanting to practice for a while).

 All in all, this section was pretty awesome.  I'd certainly like to go back if the opportunity ever presents itself again.

Not a bad walk for doing laps on the river

Emptying some spare water after the second lap

Island that separated the two channels

Surf Wave on the left side

Red River 

Drying out at the Put-in

 On day two, we headed about an hour south to the Sunday standby, the Red River.  Though everybody had their wet gear on lines over night, we all took the shuttle to get our gear a little bit drier and a little bit warmer.  There was one family of locals, and I'm sure we looked pretty amusing laying everything out.

 The first couple rapids on the Red aren't anything crazy, but there was something about the river level that made Single Drop a little bit trickier than usual.  The hole at the bottom kept turning people sideways and then pulling them back in.  Some people flipped, but there's a nice pool for rescues at the bottom.

 Second Drop had some good baby surfs, and a fair number of people tried the holes out.  My level of surfing was one more rapid down, at Double Drop.  The bottom hydraulic of that rapid is pretty forgiving, and an excellent place to get comfortable in a wave.

Surfing Double Drop

 We were hoping to have some time at Monastery for lunch, but since it's the biggest rapid on the river, we took a lot of time to scout, set safety, and run people through one at a time.  I got the cleanest run I think I've ever made, and I got some rope practice too (caught one person and kept them from going over the bottom drop - woo!).

Monastery (Low Water)

 By the time we left Monastery, I was getting awfully hungry, and it was getting awfully close to 4:00.  There are two rapids below the Monastery, one is kinda curvy and tricky for beginners (Ziemer's), but the other one isn't too rough.

Bottom Drop at Monastery

 As soon as we got out to scout Ziemer's, I grabbed my sandwich from Ali's kayak and scarfed it down.  I might have been the demo boat if I hadn't been so busy eating, but I ended up in a safety eddy instead (which was pretty cool).  Though we had to run the rapid one by one, everyone had a pretty clean run, and we were on our way again in no time.

View from my safety eddy (Ziemer's)

 After Ziemer's, there was a fair amount of flat water, one little shoot, and then we were at the takeout (maintained thanks to a Chicago paddling club).  We got some food nearby (in Shawano, WI) and were home before midnight.

Bottom of Ziemer's (runnable side)

Other side at Ziemer's

Taking out at the Yellow Paddle

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60732531@N00/sets/72157631675744104/ for more trip pictures.