Tag: adventure

A trip down memory lane…

by Maggie, posted in Uncategorized

Karen and I chose a different sort of paddle this year. Not as long as we have in the past. And in a place that is dear to me: The Chemung Valley of the Southern Tier of New York State. We enjoyed three days on the Chemung River starting in Addison, NY, and making our way to Athens, PA, where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna River. A total of about 55 miles. We paddled another five miles on the Susquehanna to the next boat access point, five miles that we had paddled a few years ago as part of our four-year journey on the Susquehanna from Cooperstown, NY, to the Chesapeake Bay. And we hit some of the same headwinds that reminded us how difficult some of the larger rivers can be to navigate! We don’t tend towards paddling the same waters more than once but the need to find a spot to get out overtook that. Too many rivers left to repeat any of them!

The weather was great during the day. It was too cold for my sleeping gear in the evenings. Lesson learned there. I will invest in new equipment and remember my long underwear next time, regardless of the weather forecast. The scenery was as beautiful as ever we find on our river trips.

The nostalgic aspect of this trip was strong. Born in 1956 in Elmira, NY, which straddles the Chemung River, memories flowed back to me as we approached the city. Bottcher’s Landing is a river access point now, and I recall back in the day it was a farm and farmstand where my mom would go for flowers and/or vegetables.

And what was that park that was accessed by trolley? Boom, the memory came back: Rorick’s Glen. It had been an amusement park and entertainment center for a couple of decades at the start of the 20th century. It was long gone when I was a child, but we still managed to get over the old wooden bridge and spook around. Nothing remains of the bridge but the abutments.

Bottcher’s Landing
Old Abutments

Paddling towards West Elmira where our house was, we passed under Fitch’s Bridge, one of the many bridges connecting downtown Elmira and its Southside. My mother used that bridge to “relocate” the squirrels she trapped in her yard. It was a never-ending job! Speaking of my mother, Mary, I had a chance to reunite with her Goddaughter and my friend who lived next door, Mary Marsden. By chance we were both in the area and it was fun to include her in this year’s journey.

Fitch’s Bridge
Mary, Maggie, Karen
New friends with Friends of the Chemung River Watershed

A special highlight of our trip was meeting up with the Friends of the Chemung River Watershed. Not only did they meet us, but they brought along two TV stations who interviewed us. It was our 15 minutes of fame and a great way to help the cause of the river! Each took a different slant on our story. One (WETM) was focused on the river. The other (WENY) focused on these old women paddling our hearts out! We laughed as we listened! We were in the local Star Gazette as well.

The dam in Elmira was our only portage this year. Our new friends had cleared out the spring growth (nasty knotweed that overtakes indigenous plant) the day before so that we could pull up the gear and the canoe and get it around the dam. The dam creates a pool of water that is treated to become the drinking water for the city. The portage is very near where my parent’s first apartment was and where my sister came into this world.

Skyline of Elmira, now minus the roofline of my home church which burned to the ground in February 2025.
Dunn Field, Elmira’s Minor League field and where my high school graduation took place in 1974 with a streaker crossing the field as people were leaving!

As we paddled out of downtown Elmira, we approached Dunn Field, forever emblazoned in my mind not for my high school graduation but for the streaker who stole the show at the end! My first of two streaker spottings in 1974

The derelict hotel and restaurant is where we would go with our grandparents. It overlooks I86.
Way up on the hillside O’Brian’s was once a great place to stop on the old road to New York City, before the interstate was built.

Winding beneath the remains of the hotel that used to be on a main road, we made our way from the nostalgia of the Elmira area toward Waverly where the river dips into Pennsylvania, heading to the Susquehanna. At that point it was back to things as usual on the river: beautiful scenery, heron, osprey, eagles, turtles…and even a two-foot-long water snake which Karen spotted just as I put my feet in the water on either side of the canoe! Needless to say, I pulled my feet in quickly and never saw the snake slithering off.

Elmira is behind me now, literally and figuratively. Much of what I knew growing up is gone. It remains a river town, with all the challenges and hospitality that we have experienced on every river we have paddled.

One last bit of nostalgia: Kim, who Maggie met in elementary school 60+ years ago, was our river angel who came to fetch us at the end of our trip and take us back to Corning where our cars were. I have only seen her twice since graduating from high school at the above-mentioned Dunn Field.

A new year 2026

by Maggie, posted in Uncategorized

A year has passed since we paddled the bulk of the Connecticut River in 8 days. The river froze over this winter more that I had seen in our 11 years in Vermont. In many places it was flat ice that could be skated or walked on, unlike the choppy chunks I usually see due to freezing and thawing multiple times. This past winter in New England was mostly freezing! In fact, summer is having a hard time arriving. We still have temps in the 40’s.

But now the river is thawed and, crossing it many times a week to travel to Claremont, NH, I think fondly back to last year…even the night we thought we might freeze to death! I have actually paddled on it a couple of times this spring. Yes, I finally bought a used LL Bean kayak! I resisted getting a kayak for many years and for many unreasonable reasons. But the river and ponds of New England call to me and I want to get out more than once a year. And I treated myself in honor of entering my eighth decade of living as of my 70th birthday in April.

Now it is time to plan a new trip in a few weeks. However, I realized I never summarized last year in this blog! So, please click here to read some of the high points and low points of those two weeks!

Meanwhile we turn our paddles to a much smaller river though it is very significant. I grew up in Elmira, NY, which straddles the Chemung River, a short but stately little river that provided livelihood to Elmira for a few hundred years. Our family dates back to around 1800. But for all our history in that place, I have NEVER paddled the Chemung River. I find this fascinating and have pondered why. The best answer I can come up with is that in the mid to late 20th century, many of our rivers remained industrial. They were ugly and polluted. They were not seen as a place for recreation.

Fortunately, things have changed. People are studying the nation’s rivers and learning about them. Karen has become a volunteer with the PennState Extension Master Watershed Steward Program in Western PA…the watershed that fed our first 1234 miles of paddling. I have recently joined the Connecticut River Conversancy volunteers and have also learned about the Vermont Center for Ecostudies Loon Conservation Project. We do these things because we now have some time in our retirements and because we have learned how important our rivers are. So many people before us had to fight to clean up the rivers and create recreational opportunities. It feels good to help sustain some of that work.

So, on June 15th, we will meet at the headwaters of the Chemung River, somewhere near Hornell, NY. We will paddle the short 45 miles down to Athens, PA. Depending on our timing perhaps we will paddle of few miles on the Susquehanna River that takes the waters of the Chemung and deposits them eventually in the Chesapeake Bay.

Hopefully I will report that trip sooner than I did last year’s. Thanks for paddling along with us.

The Rivers are Flowing Again

by Maggie, posted in Uncategorized

IMG_4270[1]It was just a few weeks ago, early April, when the frozen surface of the Connecticut River finally broke up and floated away.  One day it was frozen and the next day it was a sea of ice floes.IMG_4272[1]  Then it returned to just a river, flowing towards the ocean.  Finally this long winter is giving way to spring.  It is taking its merry time but it is happening.  The grass is all of the sudden turning green again and the first daffodils are showing their bright faces in Vermont.

Perhaps it is all this change that finally pushed me to making my plane reservations to fly to Ohio in June where I will be met by Karen in her van with our red canoe, Wonder, atop it.  We will drive together to the spot in the Ohio River where we stopped paddling two years ago.  Seems like forever since that day that we managed one mile an hour against strong headwinds just about 50 miles shy of Cinncinati.  Maybe it was fortuitous that we didn’t get as far as we had hoped.  This year, because we are still near the city, we are going to partake of a communal paddling event, The Great Ohio River Paddlefest, with a few hundred other kayak and canoe enthusiasts.  That takes place on June 19th, the end of our week on the river.

So, I have made the plane reservations.  Now I have to sort through the boxes in our new home to find the camping and canoeing gear.  I know that I packed it somewhat sensibly but I didn’t think to keep it separate from other boxes as I thought we would have actually moved into the house by June.  We are remodelling an old farm house and, of course, it all takes longer than anticipated.  So the boxes are still in the garage.  I should start looking this weekend!

It is time to start looking at maps and plotting our course.  Who will we meet this year?  We don’t know the specifics but we do know that they will be the generous and hospitable people for whom the Ohio River is their front yard.

Next try

by Maggie, posted in Allegheny River, Canoe Trips, Cassadaga Creek, Conewango Creek, Marden Cobb Water Trail, Uncategorized

I’ve not yet aged to perfection.  I still have a little of that accomplishment/acquisition blood in me. Having had our exciting though short-lived trip down the upper Allegheny, I wanted to do something major even if just a little major. I wanted to go up to Kennedy to get on the Conewango Creek upstream from where we had joined it years ago. We had already decided that the Cassadaga Creek presented too many issues of getting in and out or finding our way through the marshy parts. The Conewango is larger. And on Saturday when Karen’s son Jordan (getting to be baptized into the tradition of transporting us to or from paddling as Kyle and Chelsea had in the past) drove us to Kennedy, we learned it was not only larger but also significantly overflowing its banks.
We found that the road to the public ramp was closed because of the flooding water and, in case we were considering something stupid, a state trooper showed up just then to tell us the whole area was under water and we might consider getting in at Frewsburg.  He must have known that we were all wondering what would happen if we drove around those barricades and found a way to get a canoe into the creek!
IMG_3254[1]IMG_3256[1]

 

Two things: We had already paddled the Frewsburg part of the creek and we took this as a closure to getting onto the water that day.  At least that is what we thought at the time.

Finally getting to see the headwaters

by Maggie, posted in Allegheny River, Canoe Trips, Connecticut River

IMG_3252[1]I only remember seeing the headwaters of one river before last year.  It was the Arkansas River.  That’s when I learned that rivers seem to be named for where they end, not where they begin.  That’s an interesting notion to me!  Somehow I had always thought that the headwaters of a river would be grand and obvious.  The Arkansas starts in Colorado and the headwaters are a mere stream, of sorts, going through a meadow.  This proved to be the same with the Allegheny.

After completing our flume/luge-like experience, our friend John was kind enough to oblige my desire to see where the river really started.  I had googled it and found a sign indicating the headwaters.  I wanted to see that sign and so he guided us back up river about 30 minutes to the meadow where the waters trickle together to begin the stream that becomes a river with deep waters and deeper history.  The stream was tinier than Cassadaga Creek, that small waterway we had started on years earlier.

I still find it amazing that great things have such humble beginnings and I wonder if we will be able to someday say that we paddled to the other end of that river where it dumps its muddy waters into the Mighty Mississippi.IMG_3249[1]

Back in Pittsburgh

by Maggie, posted in Canoe Trips, Ohio River

We returned to Pittsburgh last night for a comfortable stay in a motel by the airport before Maggie flies out today and Karen returns home with Wonder strapped to the top of her car.  We have many people to thank for their support along the way and we will spend time in the next weeks writing about that so please stay tuned even though we are off the river.

Most especially, we want to thank our families for supporting this wild journey of ours.  Our husbands have supported this journey for ten years usually thinking we are brave and sometimes crazy.  Our children, we think, always think we are crazy.  Karen’s husband Mark has served as our meteorologist and reconnaissance man using Google Earth to seek out places to camp ahead of us.  Maggie’s husband, John, is our anchor at home, sending encouragement and prayers our way.  Chelsea, our IT person, keeps up the blog as we travel and Kyle got up at 5:15 am to transport us to the river, then spent 5 hours to come pick us up.  Kira and Jordan (as well as Chelsea and Kyle) just roll their eyes as they hear our stories and tell their friends about our trips…and we laugh at that and find support as well.

We think of  all who have tuned into our blog and who have prayed for us and hurrayed for.  We thank you for that encouragement and support.  Today we will begin to think of how and when we can get into the Ohio River in Powhatan, Ohio, and continue this journey which has become a metaphor for our lives in so many ways.