Dog Days of Summer float, August 5/6, 2006

I lay on my back in my little tent and wondered what it would feel like to have a pissed off two-thousand pound bull charge through. Would he just mash the tent with us inside or simply strip it off us like a pair of break-away pants from a Chippendales dancer? I was wondering this because to my fuzzy, three-o'clock-in-the-morning brain it made the most sense. We were camped beside a field. And in that field there must be a bull. I never knew a bull could be so territorial. But, for the last hour he had charged to and fro over the hills and through the valleys, wreaking havoc on any hapless creature that crossed his path. And now he was coming for us.

The "us" I refer to, of course, is the eight overnighters on the Dog Days float. We started the day at White Oak restaurant with hot coffee and food. (What were we thinking? I should have been sipping an iced cappuccino and wearing a chilled watermelon for a hat.) Following a ninety-minute drive we gathered with the rest of our intrepid adventurers on the banks of Bryant Creek, just below Hodgson Mill at Sycamore Access.

The thermometer in the shuttle vehicle read ninety six degrees. Ninety. Six. Degrees. The pavement had to be 120 and the wind felt like the blast of heat in my kitchen when I pull a pizza out of the oven. But the water? Oh, the water was nice. It hit all the points on my list of a great river: cool, clear and uncluttered. My little thermometer read 75 degrees in the main flow, with 58 degree water coming in from the millstream (which is spring-fed).

We started out with twelve hearty adventurers: Bobby and Jennifer Thomas, Scott Rache, Mike Frantz and my wife Angela and myself. We were joined at the put-in by some of our southern members, including Joe and Tammy Goeke and their two daughters Madison and Mackinzie, Charlotte Hathaway and a new paddler to our group named Grace that some of you might know online as "Sissyclue".

By days end we had lost six of our numbers: Grace and Charlotte could only spare one day on the river and the Goeke family needed to get back to Mountain Home. Not to worry, as we were joined at our campsite by Michelle "I've never been happier" West and Pam McDaniel. We managed to keep the Goeke family around just long enough to join us for dinner and to con Joe out of most of his dutch-oven peach cobbler. The following morning Bobby and Jennifer decided to take out at Warren Bridge and the remaining six of us trekked on toward Florence Cook Access, eight miles downstream.

The Bryant is a wonderful little river that is not frequented by the crowds that hit some of the other waterways every weekend. There are no outfitters on the Bryant, but the North Fork is close enough to bring groups in that wish to rent boats and gear. The gage online was reading about 3.4 at Tecumseh for our weekend and I wouldn't recommend running it with much less water. The section from Hodgson Mill to Warren Bridge seems to have a bit more gradient and constriction than below Warren Bridge. Our second day had much more dragging and shallows to navigate than the upper section. Maybe next year we'll just do the section from Hodgson Mill to Warren Bridge, a stretch of roughly seven and a half miles.

-- Jason Frantz