The Brazos River: Day 1
I’ll continue this blog with Jerry Craven’s and my trip down the Brazos River in May 2008. We did the forty-five mile stretch between the Highway 16 Bridge just below the Possum Kingdom Dam and the Highway 180 Bridge outside Mineral Wells in my trusty flatbottom green Pelican Colorado canoe. It took us four days; but if we had pushed, we could easily have done it in three. Jerry and I were in no hurry, though. We were both excited to experience this stretch of river that John Graves immortalized in his haunting “Goodbye to a River,” and to see whether the river in its present incarnation measured up to the river as captured by Graves.
Tuesday, May 20th
I drove to the Highway 16 Bridge on the Brazos River just below Possum Kingdom Dam and unloaded the canoe, the ice chest, and some of the waterproof-bagged supplies. Then I drove back to the Highway 180 Bridge outside Mineral Wells and picked up Jerry. We finished loading the canoe with both of our supplies and put in around 5 p.m. The put-in spot at Highway 16 is ideal. There is a cement ramp leading down to the river’s edge from the road, and a nice broad bank on which to load supplies into the canoe. Since the bank slopes gently into the flow of the river, it’s easy to get a heavily-laden canoe into the current without losing any of the load. The channel here is quick-moving and fairly shallow. The river, lined on both banks with a wide variety of trees and shrubs, is clear and cold and lovely.
We paddled and floated down past desert-varnished bluffs and salt cedars and mountain cedars and pecans and hackberries and elms and ash trees. We saw great blue herons and cardinals and a pair of Rocky Mountain bluebirds. Of course, there were also loads of bluff-loving hawks and buzzards riding the spiraling wind currents and looking for prey below. The river here alternates between broad gravel-bottomed shallows and deep clear holes full of fish. I had to get out and push a couple of times, but Jerry was able to stay in the canoe.
We took out around 7 p.m. at a little peninsula that offered an ideal campsite. There are plenty of places here to pick from, campsite-wise, and Jerry and I found a nice one. The gently-sloping peninsula consisted of pea gravel mixed with bigger rocks, and the campsite was easy to set up and had perfect river access. I went about the business of setting up camp while Jerry tried to catch some supper. He landed an eight-inch striper, and had a bunch of strikes. But it was sausage and onions and green bell peppers sauteed in olive oil that wound up being the main course. We ate it with potato salad and sliced tomatoes. Delicious. After clean-up, we celebrated our first night on the river with a Maresdous triple ale and a couple of Horned Dog barley wines around a blazing fire. The river was quiet, except for the birds and coyotes, but we were still close enough to civilization to have cell service. We couldn’t have asked for a better start.
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