2004-05-30 Wabasha County Road 7 Bridge Club

Eighty-year-old Leon Waters and I headed upstream on the rain-swollen Zumbro River in a Minnesota II canoe   at 1 PM on a cloudy Memorial Day Sunday from Bluff Valley Campground just 3 miles upstream from the town of Zumbro Falls. We were saving a shuttle trip by paddling upstream and coming back down to where we started at the Bluff Valley Campground Beach.  His son and daughter-in-law, Nate and Laura Waters, own Bluff Valley Campground and he lives in a trailer there and helps out by mowing, picking up golf balls, cleaning the pool, and cutting and stacking wood.  He had canoed twice with me last year on two-hour downstream trips on the Zumbro River and before that it had been seventeen years since he had been in a canoe.  Leon has also done some Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness trips in the distant past.  

I had only planned to take Leon on a short canoe trip today, since it was an upstream trip on a fast running river.  Even though he had never raced canoes, being 80 and still very active, I knew that Leon knew how to keep a steady pace.  Today, we would need that steady pace more than I thought.  Since early spring, I have practiced canoe racing upstream twice a week, but I had never canoed upstream on the high-banked Zumbro River with a recreational canoe paddler and I wasn’t sure how far we would go.  Leon didn’t get out on the river very often, even though he lived on it.  We were both glad to be on an adventure. 

A 2-foot-long bull snake was resting in some grass submerged in the water at shoreline as we passed and I couldn’t resist the urge to grab it just behind it’s head, after making sure it didn’t have any rattles on it’s tail.  Holding this squirming snake reminded me of the many garter snakes and bull snakes I had caught as a child growing up in the Black Hills.  I quickly dropped it back in the river because Leon was still paddling.  Just then we passed three teenage girls at the campground watching us from the riverbank above us.  “Is it hard to paddle upstream?” asked one.  “Not as hard as it would be out in the middle” was my reply.  Without hesitation, she said, “Go in the middle!”   I laughed “Why do you want to see us work hard?” and we were already past them.   

As a canoe racer, I had practiced upstream paddling on the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to Elk River and the Rum from Anoka to Isanti for more than ten years.  The upstream current offers the benefit of not having to shuttle vehicles and also provides more of a conditioning workout.  Higher water levels can provide more challenge and more back water eddies to help you go upstream easier than you might think.  However, it’s not something to try the first time without an experienced partner in the stern.  It’s a critical skill in knowing just how to bring the bow of the canoe out around an obstacle along the shore that forces the current back into the middle of the river.  That creates a fast cross current that can be tricky. 

Once the tip of the bow catches the faster current sweeping around an obstacle, you have to swing the stern out into the current from the downstream back eddy so the canoe wouldn’t be spun out into the middle of the river.  If you do it right, neither paddler need to use a rudder.  If you don’t get it right, a well placed rudder by the bow paddler can save you a lot of hard paddling trying to get the canoe back near shore.  Sometimes a canoe will be blown so far out into the current that you’re better off just crossing to the other side than trying to get back.

Once you get past the obstacle you have to be especially careful not to make any mistakes in paddling that could tip the canoe.  The most dangerous places on a river are located just upstream from obstacles (like partially-submerged trees, rocks, culverts, or bridges) because the current can easily flip a misguided canoe and crush it and it’s paddlers against the obstacle or hold them underwater until they drown.  I was very thankful that Leon was paddling very consistently so I could easily stay in sync with his pace.  I have made several mistakes, way back when I was younger and more careless, and had some life threatening rides floating helplessly down river next to a submerged canoe and a floundering partner.  It isn’t something I ever want to do again.

We kept the canoe brushing against the tall grass along the steep mud banks in the whirling back eddies along the shoreline.  Even though the downstream current was too fast to paddle against for long in midstream, we were easily able to travel upstream at 2 or 3 miles per hour, with our 20 stroke per minute pace. We dodged under overhanging tree branches and brushed against the grass covered river banks.  Occasionally, we would come to a place on the outside of a bend in the river where the faster current on the outside of the bend forced us to cross the river find better eddies on the other side.  With Leon paddling on the river side of the bow, I sometimes used my paddle to push us along the grassy bank.    

After a half hour of upstream paddling, Leon was showing no signs of being tired.  I stopped us in a deep back eddy that was actually flowing upstream and asked him if he was ready to turn back.  He said he was doing fine and wanted to keep going.  We each drank some Powerade and started out upstream again.  Another half hour later, I repeated my offer to turn around and got the same response.  I knew he didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t really know why.  I was worried because Leon was just over thirty years older than me and I wasn’t sure how hard this was on him. 

My shoulders had hurt before I learned how to paddle with torso muscles moving the blade.  It had taken me dozens of years to learn that lesson.  In watching him paddle, I could see that Leon had learned the same lesson.  He was moving his arms and shoulders together with his torso instead of stressing his rotator cuff muscles.  I asked how he learned to move like that and he told me of times on the farm, many years ago, when he had worked from dawn until after dusk because the work had to be done.

Around one bend, we surprised two large wild turkeys sitting next to the river and one took off, running awkwardly down a wide mowed path, and the other one sat quietly perplexed as we passed going the wrong direction on the river.  We saw 5 different ten-inch soft-shelled turtles diving off logs or sliding off sandy spots on the bank.  Grey and black King birds with blunt white-ringed tail feathers flew from branch to branch ahead of us.  An Indigo Bunting bird jumped from branch to branch along the shore to keep ahead of us and a large Golden Eagle flew ahead of us. 

An hour and a half into the adventure, I stopped again and this time I told Leon that we had gone further than I had planned to go today and any more upstream paddling was up to him.  I had been practicing paddling several times a week for at least two hours each time and with four hours being the longest paddle so far this year.  I didn’t want Leon to overwork himself and I didn’t want his wife and family to be mad at me for working him too hard.  Leon wanted to keep going and still showed no signs of getting tired.  I hoped I would still be paddling in thirty years, when I reached Leon’s age, and then followed him … heading upriver again.  We only encountered two or three places where I actually paddled at a faster pace than Leon, taking two quick strokes to his one longer stroke to help us get through bottlenecks where the river narrowed. 

The last challenge we faced was a set of class I rapids with some white capped waves in the main channel.  I pulled the canoe into some overrun grass and brush on the inside of the bend and got out to scout a narrow overspill channel that looked like it might be too shallow.  There was a small channel that was just deep enough, but we had to fight through some tree branches and work harder than we had so far.  We slowed nearly to a dead stop, but not quite, with our paddle blades crunching in the submerged gravel.  Finally, we broke through to another deep backwater eddy and found smoother paddling. 

Next came a long calm deep stretch and we rounded one last bend to see the green painted metal bridge of County Road 7 crossing the Zumbro River.  That was the goal that Leon had set and we had made it seven miles upstream in three hours and fifteen minutes with only a few short rests.  Three fishermen under the County Road 7 Bridge watched us paddle upstream in a backwater around the concrete pylon in silence.  It was 4:15 and it had taken us three hours and fifteen minutes to get here.  I’m sure we could have gone even further upstream, but there was the seven mile trip back to consider.  It would be much faster going downstream with the current, but it would still take more than an hour and the sky was looking more ominous.  Leon said he had been out in the rain before and wasn’t worried about getting wet.  .   

On the way back, fifty or more swallows dived through the air above a wide bend with dozens of nest holes in the high mud banks.  A flock of geese stood with necks stretched high, watched us like sentinels from the high bank above the river.   Large swirls gave away a frightened fish every now and then and a bass jumped to take a bug.  Muddy water from the North branch of the Zumbro clouded the clearer water of the main river to make the whole river muddy brown as we passed quietly downstream. 

Rain fell on us briefly and then gave in when we were not deterred.  The rapids were more fun going this way than they had been coming upstream.  We stopped briefly to extract a partially submerged baby carrier stuck in a downed tree, hoping it would be empty and, thankfully, it was.  There was also an old tire and a deflated plastic raft along the way, but we didn’t stop to pick those up.  The only other trash we saw was a couple of plastic bottles perched in piles of tree branches along the shore.  To offset these negatives, there were many more patches of purple and white wild flowers on shore.

We encountered two young boys pretending to fish, but mostly playing around on the shore, and Leon asked them if they caught anything, but they hadn’t.  High grassy hills with a few trees rose prominently in the distance.  It had taken us an hour and a quarter to reach the bridge from the beached uprooted tree that had a canoe wrapped around it two years before, but only thirty minutes to get back to it.  We avoided giving it a chance at our canoe by taking the other channel.  When the water was lower, the alternate channel was too shallow and you had no choice but to take the path by those ominous tree roots. 

Leon pointed out the shuttle stop where they used to drop off the inner tubers in the river.  Next we came to the place they bring the inner tubers these days.  We were close to the campground.  A few minutes later, we were back at what is normally a beach area in lower water.  It was 5:35PM and we didn’t know that a tornado would touch down less than fifteen miles away, just north of the town of Mazeppa at 7:20PM.  I carried the 45 pound Minnesota II canoe and Leon carried the paddles and life jackets back to our trailer site up the hill.  On the way, one of the seasonal campers who knew Leon drove past and said “Kick butt, Leon!”   He definitely had.   We were the founding members of the Wabasha County Road 7 Bridge Club.