The Vermont Paddlers Club

Lots of water around this fall.  I awoke bright and early Friday morning thinking about the New Haven, but with Ranch Brook well over 100 and heading straight up it seemed there might be better opportunities.  I knew a few folks would be over in the Adirondacks, so headed over to Keene Valley, past a fluffy-looking North Fork Boquet and many waterfalls around Chapel Pond to John’s Brook.  There I found two New York Justins and a Vermont Jordan and a John’s Brook that was at the very high end of runnable.

An easy choice was made to head back to the NoFoBo.  This wasn’t my first time on it, but the general quality of the run still surprised me.  With a nice mix of big boulder gardens, constricted bedrock and sloshy mini-gorges, all connected by juicy class III, it is varied, fun and not too gnarly, at least at a good medium level.  We took out at Andy’s hole, which looked deadlier than anything we wanted to deal with at that time.

After the NoFoBo we headed back to John’s Brook, which had dropped into a juicy runnable range.  We used the lower put-in, about a 15 minute walk up from the trailhead. The first quarter-mile had a lot of walking (partly because there were terminal log jams every 200 feet and partly because overall, there was a lot of water and a lot of gradient and it all seemed kind of scary).  After the fourth log jam we were able to stay in our boats and actually got to enjoy some of the awesome boulder gardens the lower half of John’s Brook is known for, though we carried the two biggest ones. We took out a little ways down the Ausable. Jordan hit the road fast since he had to be in Burlington in an hour (it was Kristen’s birthday and yes, Jordan had the day off and he spent it all paddling) while Justin and I headed towards Vermont for what we were sure would be a great weekend of boating.  

On a side note, apparently if it’s your wife’s birthday and you’re planning on going boating, you can just let Justin know and he’ll notify the appropriate parties.  I don’t know how much he charges for this service but I hope it’s a lot.