August 2-3, Thomaston, GA
Doug Caulkins of Wilderness Network of Georgia organized a trip on the Flint River for Aug 3. After ten years of drought, we’ve had generous amount of rain this year--more halfway through the year than we had all of last year. I heard someone say the other day that we’ve had more rain this year than Seattle. That means the rivers are up, and paddling is good.
The Flint is below Atlanta and has some nice class 1 and class 2 rapids.
Jim Owens, who was with me on the
Okefenokee trip earlier this summer, lives in Tallahassee and wanted to join us on the Flint but was reluctant to make the drive up for a single day of paddling. Jim put out a feeler to see if anyone would be interested in paddling the upper part of the flint with him on Friday, camping overnight at a site owned by the outfitter, which is also the put-in point for those paddling just the lower section of the route, and meeting the rest of the group at the Goat Mountain campsite on Saturday morning. It sounded like fun to me, and I’ll do just about anything to avoid waking up at the crack of dawn, so I volunteered. Jim drove up to Atlanta and stayed with me Thursday night. Friday we headed down to Thomaston.
We put in about 20 miles up the river at shortly before 11am. When we stopped for lunch around 1, Jim looked at his gps and said “This can’t be right. I must have forgotten to check something. According to Jim’s gps, we had done 8.4 miles in just over 2 hours and were very near our campsite for the night. Sure enough, about 2:30, having finished a leisurely lunch and put back in, we nearly passed the campsite, not expecting it to come up as quickly as it did.
We set up camp and had a relaxing afternoon, napping, swimming the Flint, gathering wood for a fire that night.
The next morning, the other six guys in our group arrived and, after a delay waiting for a missing paddle, we headed down the lower section of the route, which is where most of the whitewater was. One of our four boats dumped four times, and the rest of us were kept busy rescuing cameras, food, and other items from the river. Though the lower part of the trip was about the same distance as the upper, we took a number of stops to swim, to explore some old Indian caves, and to have lunch. Our trip on Saturday was about six hours.
For the full photo album,
click here or click the
Flint River Photos tab.
