The Vermont Paddlers Club

Flint Brook is a tiny little creek that drops off the east side of Northfield Ridge.  It's even more obscure than other Northfield Ridge creeks.  Driving up the Second Branch of the White you don't see a whole lot - the creek diffuses into a big wetland before crossing the road, while nearby Sandusky and E. Granville Brooks clearly pour out of steep, deep appealing gorges.  And so Flint is one of those runs you'll find only if you're driving around somewhat lost.

Once you find it though you will immediately be interested.  The access road is incredibly steep to start with... steep enough you might pass the creek off as way too steep to paddle.  But then the road flattens out and you get appealing glimpses of decent-sized bedrock rapids.  If you pull over and try to get a look, you'll find things down in a deep, very steep forested canyon that is right at home in Vermont yet not at all typical.  Then climb down into the canyon and look at the last half-mile or so of the creek and you'll be pretty excited.  A few of use had looked at it over the past few years... but it had somehow remained pretty much untouched, at least as far as anyone knew.

June 23 offered yet another round of heavy rain though I doubted I'd have time to get out of work to enjoy it that day.  Ryan mentioned Flint in an email and that immediately got my attention.  I immediately made plans for a long lunch break and at 11 headed over with Billy to meet the rest of the crew.

At the bottom it looked pretty low... things seemed a little drier over there, but I knew most of the creek was bedrock and figured it'd be good for a first-time exploring sort of thing.  We drove up to maybe a quarter mile above the 4-way intersection to where the road was blocked, and unloaded.  There's more gradient upstream, but it's not as channelized and is mostly the standard bouldery/cobbly micro without much in the way of real rapids.

Right around the corner from the put-in there was a great, steep boulder garden.  It looked bumpy at this level but was surprisingly smooth and pretty aesthetic, ending in a bedrock slot between two sculpted walls.  Flint was definitely taking an early lead.  Then some sliding and bouldery stuff that needed a little more water and some wood removal to be prime but was still pretty good all things considered.  This widened a bit before the bridge but all went fine with the low water.  Score 2, 3 and 4 for Flint.  And on my initial scout the previous year I didn't even think we'd bother running this first section!

Below the bridge was a quarter mile of pretty dechannelized cobbly stuff that would probably pretty much never have enough water to be good, then two tributaries came in and the bedrock came back.  The first of these we walked because there wasn't a good line, but with just a bit more water it'd be a great boof.  There is a private bridge accessing a hunting camp here, and that might make a better low-water put-in in the future.  Below this Flint really started showing it's quality with many slides and ledges, one or two smallish falls and the odd boulder garden here and there... none of this was that big but it all seemed to be good quality and pretty much every time you turned around there was another good rapid.  Unfortunately there was enough wood we probably carried (at least partially) almost as many rapids as we ran... but without wood this would all go and all be really fun.

There were more rapids in this section than I remembered from scouting a few years previously, and a few I hadn't gotten a look at, and I was surprised at how deep the canyon felt despite the road being just a hundred feet or so up.  I think there's a bit over half a mile of this.

Then, the canyon really deepens and steepens and there is perhaps one of the finest sections of small creek in Vermont... first a long, lowish-angle, 5-part slide that you could probably run on a tube.  Then the creek turns a corner and there's another slide, a sort of folding slide-ledge thing, a great looking slide with a few giant boulders scattered around on it, then one more slide.  Unfortunately there were probably a dozen trees lying in this stretch so this section is still waiting to see polyethylene.  If you do run this (and I hope you do) know that this ends in a brief wider spot before dropping over a pretty big double drop that does a solid 50+ feet total... though the second tier is probably runnable.  Portaging or getting out of the canyon would be tough though still totally possible.  But... that will have to wait for some other day with less wood.

Without the wood Flint is definitely one of the best sections of Vermont microcreek that's more than a quarter-mile long.  Sure Texas Falls is sweet and that last section of Hancock has the goods... but we're basically talking park-n-huck distance.  If you were to do the whole run I think it's something like 1.3 miles at 350 feet per mile.  And all but 30 feet of that is pretty much runnable.