Level ~4.2 Internet Gauge, 2.0 on the old stick gauge

Rain on Thursday set the stage for whitewater on the weekend. I talked with and emailed several people trying to figure out what the best option would be. Kenny Warwick, HalHarry Tutor, and I decided to explore the Roaring River just north of Cookeville, Tennessee. Despite being called a river, it's really a class III "creek" for the first couple of miles.

The Roaring River starts off with a huge drop, Johnson Mills, named after a mill that is no longer there. It's a complex set of slides and falls with many possible lines. We looked at the middle line but then settled on the right. It's the biggest drop I've ever run, falling about 17 feet in a distance of no more than 20 feet or so. It turned out to be too low but we all ran it anyway. I think it's one of the sketchiest things I've done in a kayak but at least nobody got hurt. Here's a photo of Kenny Warwick boofing the living @*#t out of the final ledge.


Johnson Mills

After this the river enters a section of extremely tight and brushy class III with a few large horizon lines and some twisty boulder gardens. We had a few problems with river-wide strainers and logs and we had to portage a couple of times. Since the level was really a little too low, running this section involved quite a few jarring impacts and we pinballed our way down rapids, caroming off one rock and up against the next. I tried to focus on not getting pinned. I think I left about a half pound of plastic on the riverbed.


Class III through the narrow ravine.

Eventually the river settled down a bit to class II but unfortunately in this area many of the drops are shallow slides and shoals where the water was spread a little too thinly over gently inclined bedrock. We all got stuck a few times. There are some beautiful bluffs towering up to 100 feet or even more and we all looked around to take in the beauty of the place.


Magnificent bluffs. Too bad about that little glare on the lens:-(

There was quite a bit of wildlife. We saw mostly waterfowl, including a number of herons, kingfishers, and ducks. I saw a small rodent scrambling up a leafy slope once. We also saw a lot of beaver sign.


Busy little beavers. There were a lot more trees like this one but no dams (yet).

About 3 miles into the run you eventually enter a very long segment of class I-II which is also very scenic. Fortunately the channel was a bit deeper in this segment and we made our way downstream at a good pace with much less trouble with shallow rocks. It's a good class I-II stretch similar in ways to portions of the Toccoa River. Here we saw some domestic animal life and watched an excited horse galloping across a pasture. Later we had to back-paddle a bit to allow a cow and her calf to swim and wade across the icy stream.


Takin' it easy on the way to the takeout. In the photo left to right: Kenny Warwick and Hal Tutor.

We amused ourselves through the class I sections by trying to guess how far we were from the takeout. Kenny had his GPS with him and it seemed to take forever for us to get any closer as the river meandered around. At one point he informed us that we were actually headed away from the takeout destination he had set in his GPS device and I considered the possibility that we had somehow parked the car on the wrong creek. Fortunately this turned out to not be a problem and we finally reached the takeout bridge and clawed our way up the steep banks and over the barbed wire fences to our dry clothes. It was just in time too, the sun was going behind the ridges and it had cooled off quite a bit.

We finished off the day with a feast at a Cookeville buffet and drove home in the dark with the satisfaction of another good day on the water.