Category: Delaware River

My mother always told me that I should never agree to anything a man proposed to me while drinking in a dive bar, no matter how tall, how handsome, or how funny he was. Unfortunately I was never very good at listening to my mom’s advice, so this is how I wound up agreeing to canoe the length of the Delaware River with Steven Plichta.

We had met through a medical first responder course and gotten together to study for our final exam at Burt’s Irish Pub, our favorite local watering hole. After the first beer it became clear that very little studying would be done, and we started swapping stories of our favorite miserable outdoor adventures. I had solo hiked the Long Trail during one of the rainiest springs on record, and proudly showed off photos of when one of my toes blistered so badly that the nail fell off and was floating loose inside a blister the size of a golf ball. He had paddled the length of the Mississippi, partly with a broken thumb. Basically we’re both idiots who take an ungodly amount of pleasure in “Type II Fun”. (If you’re reading this blog, you might already have figured that one out.)

By the second beer we were gleefully trading stories of our favorite rugby injuries, horrible weather experiences in the backcountry, and comparing scars.

By beer number three, he was telling me his plans to paddle the Delaware and how he was looking for a bowman to join him but nobody seemed to think spending a month in a canoe in early May sounded like a pleasant way to spend their spring break. Apparently three beers is the number that it takes for me to think that sounds like a delightful vacation, because we shook on the deal and the next round was celebratory shots.

I’m never one to back down from a drunken promise (no matter how little I remember of making it), so I bought myself a nice canoe paddle and a sturdy portage pack and resigned myself to near-certain death by drowning.

Maybe someday I’ll be the type of person who doesn’t pack my gear at the last possible moment, and I’ll get the maps together well in advance of my trip. This was not that day. Steve is also not that person. We may have thrown every item of camping gear we own into the back of his FourRunner “Latoya” and decided we’d figure it out when we got to the headwaters. We definitely spent the night in his office frantically printing out maps. On the bright side, our package of gear from Outdoor Research also showed up at the eleventh hour so at least we’re sponsored by people who understand how we roll.

The four AM departure was a little rough. Vermont was pouring rain and unsettlingly cold, and as soon as we pulled onto the road a VERY large spider dropped out of the sun visor onto Steve’s face. (We handled this in a very manly fashion that absolutely didn’t involve any screaming, flailing, or nearly driving off the road.) Fortunately the rain cleared as the sun came up, and by the time we crossed into New York we were several cups of coffee and breakfast sandwiches in and delightedly having a Weird Al singalong.

My champion roommate Ilana met us in Hancock NY where the East and West Branch of the Delaware meet to bring us to the put-in. We found a garage right by the confluence that was willing to let us leave the car there for two weeks, re-packed our gear in the parking lot, and transferred everything to Ilana’s car for the shuttle to the start of the East Branch. The novelty of gear weight not mattering hasn’t worn off for me; I brought my bomb-proof three-person tent just because I could. Heck yeah.

We ended up putting in off of Briggs Road in Roxbury, a few hundred yards from a sign that proudly stated “You can get by… or you can LIVE LIFE”. Ilana gleefully took pictures of us like we were on our way to our first day of school, I managed to get into the canoe without dumping it immediately, and we were off!

…For about five minutes. And so began the pattern of paddle, run aground, exit boat, walk boat, reload, paddle, find a beaver dam, exit boat, swim to dam, climb over dam, drag boat over dam, reload, paddle, repeat. The sun was out, the water was warm, Steve seemed relieved that I have no qualms about getting neck-deep in a beaver swamp, and the scenery was pastoral and generally lovely.

We came around a corner at one point and nearly ran into a cow standing chest-deep in the river. We backpaddled in an eddy until she sloshed her way to shore, then endured the stares of the rest of the herd as we navigated the oxbows through the pasture. A sharp turn and a quick current then led to the unpleasant discovery that sometimes farmers in upstate New York string barbed wire across rivers that run through their pastures to keep the cows wandering away downstream.

I screamed a string of warning profanities at Steve and flattened myself into the canoe with my paddle in front of my face since there was no stopping the boat. All the skin was ripped off my knuckles and my paddle blade sustained a nasty gash; Steve threw himself sideways, got two holes in his shirt, and somehow managed not to dump the boat OR run us aground.

We decided that was a good time to quit for the day and made camp by the side of a railroad bed at the edge of a pasture. Steve was feeling pretty proud of himself for packing two cold beers with which to celebrate our first day on the river, and a chilly Natty Daddy definitely soothed my anxiety about my lack of paddling experience.

What did NOT soothe my anxiety was the fact that we forgot the maps for the East Branch under the seat of Ilana’s car. Fortunately we both found this wildly hilarious and immediately adopted an attitude of “fuck it, we’re going down river, it’ll be fiiiiiiine”.

I was feeling pretty good about things for most of the day. I’d proven that I had good rhythm and could comfortably hold an even paddling pace; the temperature was relatively warm so being in and out of the river wasn’t unpleasant; we’d established a basic series of commands (“Switch! Paddle hard!”) and were increasingly comfortable with each other and confident in our abilities as we navigated tight corners and unexpected obstacles in the thready upper East Branch. We even dried out a bit as the river slowly deepened and we spent longer periods of time in the boat instead of dragging it over the shallows.

About lunchtime, we came up on an island. To the right was a wide, very shallow channel that would mean getting out of the boat five yards in and walking for an indeterminate period of time. To the left was a deep, slightly narrower channel with a quick turn right at the entrance to avoid a large log lying parallel to the river along the bank. We weren’t moving quickly, our feet were dry, and a pair of geese bobbed down the left hand side looking perfectly content and coming nowhere near the log… so we went left. We figured we could make the turn.

We didn’t make the turn.

The current picked up, the stern caught in an unexpected eddy, and we bumped broadside up against the log. Before either of us could sneak in a second curse, the boat was upside down.

We had established early on that if the boat ever flips, Steve wants my priority to be “save the canoe”. (He says if he survives and his boat doesn’t, he’ll have to kill me. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.) Since the water was only waist-deep and Steve was clearly capable of self-rescue, I immediately latched onto the canoe and through a combination of dumb luck and grinding my knees into the rocky river bottom, I managed to pin the boat against a half-fallen tree jutting into the water a few yards downstream.

Our gear had been tightly stowed in the canoe and neither of us lost our paddle in the flip, so Steve sloshed over and pulled our portage packs loose as they began to float, tossing them on shore as I braced a very large canoe against a tree in a very stiff current. With every bag that was removed, the more the boat tried to pull away and barrel downstream.

Suddenly Steve was gone. My Irish Catholic guilt made me immediately assume he was so pissed that he’d invited an incompetent, boat-flipping moron along on his epic river adventure that he’d decided to abandon me right there. As the gunnels creaked and I dug my feet deeper into the mud, I contemplated the moral complications of stealing the very expensive kevlar canoe of a man who left you to drown under a strainer. Peering over the top edge of the increasingly-wobbly boat/tree/paddler pile, I saw Steve sprinting down the river… and then lunging into the current after his hat.

Chapeau recovered, Steve returned to my rescue and I tossed him a painter line just before the canoe tried to roll again and knock me under with it. We dragged the whole shebang ashore and stood dripping for a moment, staring stupidly at one another, me figuring I was about to get reamed a new one for upending our transport.

Lucky for me, he just started giggling and began pouring water out of the thwart bags. Our portage packs were fully watertight and all the gear (save what we were wearing) was bone dry; all in all, we’d soaked an open bag of trail mix and lost two Nalgene bottles to the river. (We spent the rest of the trip hoping to find them, but no luck.)

Oh, and it turned out we only had one dry bag that had a hole in it. It happened to be the one containing my phone. Karma’s a real bitch.

We spent the night camped behind a storage container at a DEC boat launch, figuring that we were far enough from the road that it should be a quiet and restful evening. Instead, our sleep was interrupted by a collection of coyotes who we can only assume were working on their audition pieces for a cross-species production of “CATS”. Up at the crack of dawn, we packed up and hit the water with the hopes of getting across the bulk of the reservoir toward Downsville before the wind picked up. Turns out we cleared the remainder of the reservoir in two hours; when we apply ourselves, we can get some serious miles in.

We pulled up at the last launch before the dam, stashed the gear, and hiked up the road to get a look at what our portage options were; instead, we got a great look at an incoming thunderhead and sprinted back to the boat. Sadly, our feet aren’t as fast as our paddles and we ended up frantically throwing up the tarp to try to stay dry. (We failed.)

After eating most of our fruit snacks supplies and dancing around a bit to get warm, we decided the day warranted a hike into Downsville for a beer and a real look at the river. We looked pathetic enough that a passing tourist picked us up and shuttled us to the local dive bar where the bartender provided us with a few shots, a weather report, and an entire roll of paper towels so we could attempt to dry out the contents of our wallets. According to the weather channel, we weren’t going to get any dryer any time in the next week.

A carful of older fishermen at the end of the bar overheard us laughing uproariously at the weather report as we wrung out our soggy dollar bills and treated us to a “beer to go” and all of their leftover french fries in addition to a ride to the local gear outfitter and liquor store. I bought a cheap headlamp, Steve got some military-grade waterproof plastic baggies, and then we hiked back up the road with our twelve pack and sack of fries to set up camp for the night. Dinner ended up being mac and cheese those french fries rolled into burritos with extra hot sauce, which resulted in a LEVEL FIVE backcountry poop: outside, with a view, with a wildlife sighting… and the wildlife happened to be a bald eagle that was also pooping.

We stashed the canoe on an empty boat rack under the tarp with everything we owned dangling underneath it and set up the tent in the middle of the closed launch road, since it was the only place that hadn’t turned into a river during the rainstorm. (We realized later that we were in a bald eagle conservation area; oops. Sorry, eagles.) Steve decided to pile into the tent for the night since the afternoon temp was 48 degrees and scheduled to drop sharply, and we figured maybe with two of us in there we could get it warm enough to dry out all our socks.

My knees were super sore from dragging along the bottom of the river while halting the escape of the boat when we flipped, but beyond that and our sunburn we were in good spirits and having a fantastic time.

Thank the river gods for earplugs; they make Steve’s snoring sound like purring. I slept like a baby.

Packed up, put the wheels on the boat, and hauled everything up the stupidly steep launch road and then the two miles down into town. We tucked it under a covered bridge by a local park while we got hot breakfast at the local diner to check the weather report again.

RAIN! THUNDERSTORMS! COLD! Awesome. On the bright side, they had good maps and free wifi, and the waitress only told us we were “out of our damned minds” the once. We sent a few messages to update folks on our whereabouts and timeline and reassured our parents that we still weren’t dead and weren’t planning on it any time soon. I bought a wildly overpriced bottle of Jameson (after helping the store owner pin down her cocker spaniel to apply flea and tick treatment) and we were on the river once again.

The river portion went a bit more smoothly, which was good because the water was now ICY FUCKING COLD. Two minutes in the water and your feet were totally numb. Steve managed not to send me face-first into any substantial trees; fly fishermen served as the only real obstacles; and we only had to get out of the boat when the depth gave us no other choice. We had a nice lunch in Shinhopple by a defunct facility called Al’s (“the river was his world, the fishermen were his friends”) and the rain held off right up until the point where we pulled up at a ballfield about five miles upriver from Hancock.

A guy mowing the lawn told us we could camp in the picnic pavilion since there was a tornado warning (!!!) and it would provide some shelter. It was a sweet setup; all our gear was hanging from the rafters and was fully dried out, we had a leisurely dinner on a real picnic table, and Steve was laughing at me for bothering to set up my tent in a back corner while he strung his hammock from the ceiling anticipating a comfortable night safely tucked out of the light drizzle that had moved in. He even went so far as to shake his fist at the sky and scream “YOU CALL THAT A STORM?”

Never one to be mocked, nature countered. Within five minutes the wind had picked up and ripped most of our gear out of the pavilion and onto the adjacent ballfield. Our brush with death for the day came in the form of a sprint through the outfield chasing down wayward socks and first aid supplies by headlamp and lightning as horizontal sheets of rain battered us senseless.

Fortunately, one point in the pavilion stayed dry- the back corner where I had pitched my tent. As we huddled together in the one place protected from the raging thunderstorm, listening to the rafters and sheet metal roofing creak in a subtle threat of full liftoff, we laughed uproariously at what lovely weather we had for our relaxing river trip.

Note to self: if Steve is making fun of me, I’m probably doing something right.

We awoke to a river that had climbed four feet higher up the bank and changed from crystal clear to opaque brown and suspiciously full of debris. A cluster of ducks swept by looking mildly perturbed by their cruising speed, their tiny feet making no headway against the current. We hung our gear up to dry (again) and decided it might be a good idea to zero instead of setting out in flood waters toting full trees.

We hiked a few miles into the town of East Branch only to discover that they had no library and that nobody in town knew where the closest one was. We hitched a ride halfway to Hancock to a riverside hotel that someone thought might have wifi (it was closed) and then decided to walk the rest of the way to Hancock to get beer and maybe retrieve the car.

We passed a church with a signboard outside proclaiming that life had a “100% Chance of Death”; figuring that was the closest we’d come to an omen we went inside to see if they’d take pity on us and give us a lift the last six or seven miles. Pastor Bob and GB the church dog found us entertaining enough to kindly shuttle us straight to the Hancock public library.

For the record, public libraries are an underappreciated godsend. Free internet! Bathrooms! Maps! People who know useful things about the local geography and amenities!

We swung by the grocery store (and the liquor store) then hiked out to the car to drive ourselves back to the pavilion outside East Branch for a night of glamping. We used the car to further shelter the tent and canoe from the increasing winds, then settled down for the evening with a twelve pack of Yuengling for a very boozy few rounds of “go fish”.

The long day of walking should have wiped us out, but neither of us got much sleep with the local emergency sirens going off all night due to the tornado warning. Fortunately the winds didn’t get too extreme, and we never felt like there was a real chance of the tent flying away with us in it. Oz wouldn’t have known what to do with us, anyways.

With the trip on a timeline and the river level down about eight inches, we made the decision to send it and run the last five river miles before the confluence. Since our friend Justin was scheduled to come meet us midday to help us shuttle up to the start of the West Branch, we figured the safest way to get to Hancock was to leave the bulk of our gear in the car and run the still-flooded waters with just ourselves and an emergency change of clothes in a dry bag strapped to the thwart. Once we hit Hancock, Justin could bring us back to the car and the rest of our gear.

The current looked slower than it had been the previous day, but as soon as we launched we realized we were in for a wild ride and decided we were happy to be wearing life jackets. We did very little actual paddling; I perched white-knuckled in the bow scanning for any indication that a boat-flipping boulder or log might be ahead of us in the muddy surge, and Steve ruddered cautiously in the stern.

Everything went smoothly until we were in sight of Hancock when we came around a bend and confronted a quarter-mile stretch of three- and four-foot-tall standing waves. Steve steered admirably while I hollered out boulder locations and tried to convince myself I wasn’t scared shitless. I was soaked to the bone about ten seconds in (Steve remained suspiciously dry), but despite the amount of water we took on we stayed upright and coasted to shore as soon as we were through the rapids so we could bail out the boat. I like to think that I came across as nonplussed and completely comfortable with the fact that I had just been spat out of the largest waves I’d ever run in a canoe. I picked some mud out of my teeth and poured the water out of my pockets and tried to play it cool. Steve seemed pretty unfazed; you’d have to ask him if I looked like something other than a half-drowned river rat.

As we rounded the last bend into Hancock the sun burst through the clouds and with the chanting of angels ringing in our ears we barreled into the pullout at the confluence of the East and West Branches- our paddles’ first taste of the Delaware proper.

We walked into town and straight to the library (I left a trail of muddy water droplets behind me for the first mile), established that Justin was en route to meet us, stuffed ourselves with diner food, acquired a FUDR sticker, and then parked ourselves at Honest Eddie’s Bar at the Hancock House hotel to see how many $3 Yuenglings we could finish before our ride arrived. (Three each.)

Justin tore into town with nearly as much force as the river, shuttled us back to Latoya, and then we all returned to the parking lot at the confluence to set up camp with a 30 rack of Miller Lite. Steve and I rejoiced that all our dry items had been safely stowed in the car all day when the temperature dipped below freezing… and kept going. The angry geese and the bald eagle across the river must have envied us our snug tent as it sank into the 20’s. Steve mocked me for wondering if the nearby flock of ducks was warm enough.

After busting through the crust of frost encasing the tent, reorganizing all our gear in the parking lot, stashing Latoya at the garage once again, and having the most terrible gas station breakfast experience ever, we loaded into Justin’s car for the trip north to Hobart.

After some meandering up and down a handful of back roads, we located a suitable put-in on a small stream dumping into the upper West Branch. I think Justin was expecting to drop us off and watch us paddle triumphantly down an open river, but instead he was treated to an awkward slog down shin-deep streambed while we lined the canoe between us. The bulk of the day was an equal distribution of walking, paddling, scouting and portaging through terrain dotted with downed trees, weird dead animal parts, and trash from multiple decades recently unearthed by the flooding.

 

While stopped for lunch, Steve located a bloated white tick on the back of his knee and proceeded to have a very calm meltdown. It was the first time one had broken skin on either of us, and we weren’t happy about it, but there was definitely no profanity, agonized dancing with flailing of arms, making me turn around so he could strip naked and check everywhere for more, or neurotic swatting at the “crawlies”. None whatsoever.

We camped for the night behind a flood berm at the edge of an elementary school soccer field. Having decided not to fuck around any longer with the potential for rain, we set up the tent under our giant tarp. There absolutely was not a half hour span where each of us stripped naked in the tent, frantically scanned every inch of our skin with my first aid kit’s mirror looking for ticks, and had a panic attack at every speck of dirt or small mole. No way. After that span of time that definitely didn’t occur, we had a leisurely evening tea under our covered “porch”.

Too bad the tea was flavored with Taco Bell fire sauce since Steve had failed to rinse the pot.

Slept in until about ten this morning because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to get out of the nice warm tent in the frigid drizzle.

Paddling conditions today brought log dams, remnants of old bridges (complete with cement blocks and boat-stabbing rebar), weird eddies, and an assortment of barbed and electric wire fence lines dangling dangerously close to our faces. (WHAT is WITH this state and hanging fences over waterways?!) There have been points where the riverbank is made entirely of old demo derby cars, which looks super cool but doesn’t bode well if we need to pull ashore without getting tetanus. Crazy tight oxbows led to some close calls with sweepers and boulders, and there were a few moments where the boat wasn’t exactly pointed downriver. We dealt with several sketchy portages through knots of downed trees and mud, all while getting dumped on with borderline freezing rain. Occasionally a tight turn spun us around a bend and into a fishing hole surrounded by locals, and we yelled our apologies as we were swept downstream.

We had stopped for a late lunch at the edge of a willow swamp just before a massive downed tree completely blocked our passage when we heard the first echoes of thunder. We had planned on paddling another ten miles or so, but we were both more wet than dry and my toes were going numb. I turned to Steve and asked what he wanted to do; he was staring vacantly at the willow sweeper blocking the river while fumbling with his jacket zipper and said he didn’t know.

Folks, when Steven Plichta doesn’t have an opinion, something has gone horribly wrong.

I went into “aggressive crew leader” mode and twenty minutes later we had camp set up for the night. Fortunately a set of dry clothes, a warm tent, and a big pot of bacon mac and cheese with some instant mashies dumped in for good measure restored function in our extremities and Steve’s mental acuity did a full 180.

Hypothermia’s a sneaky bastard, but at least we find it funny.

We slept in again, because sleeping bags are warm and the rest of the world is not.

Fortunately the weather had cleared a little by the time we set out, and we were treated to a few glimpses of sun tucked between intermittent sprinkles of rain. The paddling itself was much easier today since the river is slowly getting wider and deeper, but this meant that when we had to portage it was because of something ugly. The times we got out of the boat were for huge piles of downed trees packed full of debris from the flooding and often meant dragging the boat several hundred yards through stinging nettles, brambles, and nests of broken beaver dams.

We cruised through the towns of Delhi and Bloomville and a few other nameless hamlets and camped just above Walton for the night on a beautiful grassy floodplain dotted with hardwoods. This was the first full day of paddling we’d managed in a while between the weather and the river conditions. This was also the first day in a while that we hadn’t crawled into the tent half frozen and soaking wet. Small victories!

Discussing our various wildlife sightings over dinner, we realized that when confronted with a split in the river where an obvious “right choice” wasn’t evident, always follow the ducks. Ducks bob along with wherever the majority of the current is headed, and don’t seem to like scary rapids or hidden obstacles any more than our canoe. They haven’t led us wrong yet. Plus they’re cute, and they don’t hiss at us.

Geese, on the other hand, are still hell-bent on leading us to our doom at every given opportunity. NEVER follow the geese.