Lost off Huffman Bridge

With no chatter of an ad hoc group paddle, we decided to check out another section of the Upper Catawba River Valley. The Huffman Bridge Access, near Valdese NC, is #16 on the river trail map. It's another nice paved parking lot and I learned that "canoe access" means shore access, no ramps. The shore wasn't mud, or sand, but pebbles. Here's a river view downstream from the put-in. And another, just upstream from the bridge, of Kathleen entering the shallow cove ...


Now for the embarrassing part: After checking out this little cove, which I remembered seeing on Google Maps satellite images, we headed further up the river. In no time, I became directionally challenged. I could see three different choices and nothing that indicated which was the river. We choose the rightmost option and started off. I knew there were several feeder creeks coming into the Catawba - including the Johns River, which we paddled last week. After a period of time, I lost confidence in the choice and we turned back. As we went up each of the other two options, we hit dead ends in no time. Sheesh! But they were attractive dead ends; one had a wood duck box in the water and the other was clearly a cove. Lesson learned = Always bring a map in the boat! (After getting back home, these detours were obvious on Google Maps.)

In any case, we turned around and headed back up the river. A partial justification for my confusion - the Catawba here is completely impounded. In other words, it's backed up and has no noticeable current. It can't be that deep either. Here I am holding on to a tree stuck in the middle of the river ...


The southern side of the river is, for the most part, more attractive since it's formed by hills along most of our paddle. The northern side tends to flatter sections. We didn't see a whole lot of wildlife, but what we saw was marvelous. A good sized eagle, a half dozen wild turkeys (a rafter of turkeys?) scurrying up a steep hill, and a huge owl. We'd never seen wild turkeys before. And Kathleen thought it was an owl, but couldn't tell what kind. I only saw something with a 3-4 foot wingspan flying back in the woods very quietly. In the non-animal kingdom, there was this really striking mushrooms or lichens on a floating branch ...


As we kept going up river, we passed a couple feeders on the north side, one of which was the Johns River. But we didn't make it all the way up to the next bridge where US18/64, Lenoir Road, crosses over. It was getting late for our turnaround point, and gunfire from a nearby shooting range was a bit unnerving. Between the hills and some really tall, completely open, hangars for a municipal plant, the gunshots produced some really odd echoes. Not distant echoing but rapid retorts almost like an automatic.

All in all, about 3.5 hours on the water.