The Vermont Paddlers Club

All three rivers that flow west through the spine of the Green Mountains to Lake Champlain were at flood stage by the end of 4/20 on account of a soaking rain Friday night on the heels of a warm and windy Thursday/Friday that set the stubborn snowpack in the deep woods up the feeder valleys a-melting. North Williston Road and Rt. 15 in Cambridge were under water by day's end. And although I never laid eyes on Joe's Brook I'm positive it was too high for any of us to want to run it. So instead I spent the morning driving around up north looking for something that seemed reasonable when virtually everything was too high. Call me weird, but I have to say road scouting 8 or 10 raging rivers with coffee and doughnuts on board was almost as much fun for me as actually paddling one. By 11 am, after looking at Mill Brook (in Jericho), the Lee R., the Browns R.(in Underhill), the Seymour R., the Brewster R. (all probably reasonable), followed by the NBL @ ~4 feet, the Gihon, and the Green R. @ 4.5 feet (none of them reasonable), I drove up the Mountain Road in Stowe (VT108) as far us Notch Brook Road, and shared my plan to run the West Branch of the Little River (WBL) in a group text.

More rain arrived as we were suiting up to paddle, but once you're in your drysuit it really doesn't matter. There is a convenient put-in eddy under the VT 108 bridge on river right, upstream from the Matterhorn Restaurant and Bar, at the confluence of Ranch Brook and the West Branch, with a place to park vehicles at the foot of Ranch Brook Rd. At high water the paddle from this confluence down to Taylor Park (the "Stowe Peace Park") is 2.5 miles of non-stop, FUN boogie water. FU rocks and strainers were a non-issue, except for one obvious river-wide (large) tree trunk a few inches above the waterline, where the river and rec path converged.

The main stem of the Little River in Stowe Village had crested just over 3000 cfs at 9am, pretty big for such a little (get it?) river. The one WBL feeder stream with a real-time USGS gauge - Ranch Brook at Ranch Camp - had crested overnight at 360 cfs (dropping to 240 cfs when we met at 1pm). The WBL only dropped 1" during our run (according to my rudimentary stick-in-the-mud gauge at our Rusty Nail/W Br Sculpture Garden take-out).

We ran into Ben and a crew of hair boaters as we were changing back into our street clothes after our run. They were setting shuttle to do the same thing, except they were going to start even higher up, on Ranch Brook. Prior to our run, I walked up to look at Bingham Falls, which was quite impressive.

It was a fun day!