My plan is still to arrive on Wednesday 5/4 but won’t paddle until Thursday. Odds are I will be by myself as Rob tried to kneel in a boat tonight and he just can’t do it yet and considering we only have a week and a half before I leave I don’t see him getting the knee to be where he needs it to be to paddle. He is doing rehab but it’s going to take more time than he or his doctor originally thought. Look forward to seeing everyone and getting back on the North Fork. Safe travels to everyone, see ya soon!
Tried this as a PM but just get an error message. I will be in the Buffalo area next week, 4/25-29, with family…hiking waterfalls after the predicted heavy rain and hopefully paddling later in the week. I’m considering heading the the Rendezvous at Twin Bridges on Monday. I would be interested in sharing shuttles after family heads home. Let me know if you would like to do some paddling Friday thru Sunday before the Rendezvous. I’m very familiar with the paddling options throughout the Ozarks and up for anything (except Hailstone, above my pay grade, Cheers, Marty B.
Rigth now it looks like Tom and I will arrive at Twin Bridges on Sunday, May 1st and stay the week. Looking forward to seeing everyone and trying out my new kayak.
Laurel
Have a great time everyone. Carl and I need to get back to a Rendezvous.
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Houston i have successfully arrived at twin bridges. 100 miles of Buffalo went quick, waited a day for water to drop. Mulberry was fun. Today , resting, drying out, and reading the guide books, bryant creek?
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Good to see this rendezvous going strong!
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Yes, go check out Bryant Creek, we typically do that one day during the Rendezvous. Great fishing, if you fish and have gear bring it with you.
See everyone on Wednesday!
Miss seeing you and Carl, one of these days maybe I can talk JoAnne and Margaret to head down your way, it would be fun!
Not going to make it this time. Maybe fall will workout better for me. I have some great memories camping and paddling with the group.
Will postpone leaving until Tuesday the 3rd due to weather. Looks like i would be traveling under heavy thunder storms with large hail all the way over on Monday. Tues looks much better.
Bryant Creek looks very good as does the Eleven Point River others are interested. The Buffalo River following the Rendezvous would be a fine finale to this springs’ paddle time. Then back to work.
Oops, Jjjune was pulled up from my old P-net logon from 2014. Do wish we were still P-net but unfortunately it’s gone. Many of the reviews i had posted never transferred. The preceeding message should have been posted under my current user name of Snarvol.
Dick, we’ll miss you. Hope to see you in the fall!
That would be great.
Thanks to all for making me feel so welcome. It is so fun to meet other passionate paddlers and the Rendezvous was great, Nice to have actual face time and have cyber paddlers morph into actual friends. The cliffs and springs were beautiful, High water required patience and good conversation and I ate way too much of Don’s cookin’.
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And good to have met you! Where are you? Please keep us informed of your further adventures.
tdaniel,
Per our former discussions I’m sending you the name of an excellent guide to the Rio Grande in New Mexico including good discussions on the “Razorblades, Upper Box, Taos Box, and the Racecourse”. White water sections to Class 5 and excellent commentary about water levels & the passing countryside.
“The Rio Grande”, Paul Bauer, 2011. ISBN 978-1-883905-28-6. New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources.
As to Texas… “Texas Whitewater”,by Steve Daniel (a distant relative I’m sure), ISBN 0-89096-885-3, Texas A&M University Press, 1999. An excellent reference describing put-ins, river sections of interest, & take-outs. If the water levels are good, i recommend the “Little Blanco River”. Beautiful passing under a canopy of cyprus trees the initial gradient of 12’/mi increases to 40’/mi further downstream before passing through canyons with waterfalls & rock gardens.
Enjoy - Snarvol
where’s the pictures, and the write up, always, look forward to seeing them, and hear about everything?
Second rufus_sr’s comment and sentiments. Pretty please… from an old Ozark Rendezvouser. 
PuffinGin
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Well, I was hesitating to put up a trip report because there were many who attended who were there both before and after I was this time. So my report is incomplete and I didn’t take any photos this time. But I’ll share what I can…
I left Wisconsin in rain. Spring was just appearing - first appearance of marsh marigolds and hepatica, trees were just beginning to bud and it was in the 40s. Not a particularly auspicious start. By central Illinois the sun was shining and it was windy, as it often is on the plains in spring. At a rest stop near Springfield there were flowering bluebells, dog-toothed violets, trees were leafed out, redbuds… Much better. I took a motel room in Mo. after leaving the expressway to get a last hot shower and sleep in a bed.
Next morning was beautiful until about 15 miles from Twin Bridges when the rain returned. I set camp in the rain at about noon and met tdaniel for the first time. He was just coming off the river having done a section of the Northfork that morning in the rain, but was ready to do the next section and, as the rain was letting up a bit, I was amenable to going also. So we did the next section, down to Hammond Camp (though it has a more proper park service name that I can’t now recall), a distance of about 5 miles. The rain was light, to merely misty, to a little sun breaking through. The hills were green and red with redbud. Sweet william and mayapples were abundant. The river was surprisingly clear at that point despite the rains. After a northern winter of browns and greys the Ozarks can seem like heaven even on a grey drizzly day.
Tazzmo (Tom and Laurel, fellow Wisconsonites) who were already there and BradAK greeted us upon our return. BradAK had a new (to him) truck and travel trailer that he’d acquired and driven from Idaho (after flying from Alaska) and there were a bunch of folks from FL who joined us for the first time…
Bob & Sue with a lab they were prepairing as a service dog, and Ed and Layla. Like tdaniel, they were touring and we were but one stop on their extended paddle adventures. Pblanc was just setting up camp as I recall. And Martypaddles from Kansas was already there, having stopped in after a quick turn-around he’d made following another jaunt he’d made with his family.
And the rain returned. Brad, tdaniel, and I ended up hanging out under the tin roof behind the camp store (none of us had a tarp rigged yet) BSing over a couple beers till midnight - talk of rivers and boats and plans for the future - including the next day. At about 11:00 rain was starting to run off the hills and formed a small puddle under the shelter. An armadillo stopped by for a drink completely unconcerned by our presence. Not in Wisconsin any more Toto…
Next day, after a rather improvised (in other words kinda’ disorganized) start, we hit the water at about 11:00 and did Topaz back to Twin Bridges (~17 miles). A beautiful day’s paddle on clear Ozark waters with miles of varnished bluffs and a bit of wind toward the end. The day ended with a campfire at Tazzmo’s site and the zipper on my tent blowing out afterwards.
Next day (after knocking down my tent and pitching a spare I had on hand) Pete (pblanc) over a typically excellent breakfast (with snarvel who I had met many years previously but not been in contact with) at the campground restaurant (?!! - try that in the BWCA) Pete convinced a bunch of us to drive over to the Jack’s Fork and do “the Prongs”, a section of that river which I’d not previously done and which is often either too high or too low for decent paddling. We had to go. It was running at just the right level (~500cfs). I was reluctant at first because we were already on a river… I thought “why not paddle where we are?” But Pete was dead on absolutely perfectly correct - it was a beautiful run. Perhaps the prettiest in the Ozarks… but there are a lot of good ones, its a close judgement call. The weather was good right up to the very end, and what a beautiful stretch of river that is! We got drenched in a downpour on the last 100 yds and at the landing at Buck’s Hollow. So it goes… Pam arrived that afternoon and Marty left.
I slept like a baby that night with rain pouring on the tent and awoke to a couple thunder claps. Apparently I slept through quite a storm. There was a puddle or two in the tent, the river had come up several feet, turned chocolate milk brown, and completely submerged the gravel bar directly in front of my tent, though I was probably 15 ft over the bank, so no risk. And the river just kept rising.
After another fine breakfast it was apparent that there would be no paddling that day - lots of logs and small trees were shooting by. Not a safe day to be paddling and perhaps dealing with high fast water and the strainers those logs might be forming downstream. I took a drive to look at some of the landings downstream. The eddies were filled with debris. It would even be hard to eddy out in a lot of places. There were some roads that had flooded. The Jack’s Fork, which had been running at 500cfs the previous day was running at over 6,000.
So we hung around camp. By evening it was dropping and there was hope for a run the next day.
The next morning we gathered at breakfast and got a weather report that included more rain. I was feeling uncharacteristically prudent and decided to head for home. Beautiful sunny day on the drive back, though. I made a stop for a short hike at Starved Rock in IL - the place where I was “rescued” over forty years ago and which I wrote a bit about on another thread.
The photos and the rest of the story I’ll have to leave for others. Folks paddled before I arrived and, I presume, after I left. But that’s their story to tell.
A minor correction. The float above Twin Bridges began at Hale Ford (I’ve never been up to Topaz) for a distance of 9.3 miles. Not minor we’re two river wide log obstructions within the first few hundred yards which had to be negotiated. The river was clear beyond that.
Still lots of water in the Ozarks if anyone is down that way. Marty