A Slice of Heaven in Little Hell

A Slice of Heaven in Little Hell

a Carolina Paddler Article

by Burt Kornegay

∞ When I returned from a 5-day canoe trip this month on a small swampy river in southern Georgia called Brier Creek, I sent an email to Suzanne Welander, the author of the state’s comprehensive Canoeing & Kayaking Georgia. Dear Suzanne, I wrote, If you publish a new edition of your valuable river guidebook, the chapter on Brier Creek will now need to be only one word long: “Blocked.”

Exploring Brier Creek had been on my mind for several years, and—its water levels looking good in April—I set out to do it with companions Bobby Simpson and Keith Aldridge. We launched at the GA56 bridge east of Waynesboro, with the goal of following Brier Creek for 55 miles to its confluence with the mighty Savannah River, then down the Savannah for another 10 miles to a public access at Poor Robins Landing. And we would have made the entire trip as planned—if we’d launched in April of the year before. I could tell that Brier Creek would have been a much more open waterway to paddle in 2024, its channel small and intimate, twisting and turning, canopied by a mature forest, with a lot of wildlife. And Brier Creek still has the wildlife! It has American hollies too, one of the most sweet-smelling trees anywhere when in bloom, and our trip coincided with their fragrant flowering. But in April 2025 we found the creek’s channel itself blocked by trees that had been uprooted by Hurricane Helene.

Becky and I had been in the eye of Helene last September when the storm came through Cullowhee, where we live, and although we experienced no damage, many areas in the North Carolina mountains suffered greatly. But I did not know that Helene’s 100 mph winds had extended all the way down to Brier Creek in Georgia’s coastal plain, 250 miles away. Our April canoe trip “learned” me different.

What do I mean by saying Brier Creek is blocked? In her guidebook, Welander describes the creek’s first 10-mile reach as being “largely problem free” when she and her husband canoed it in 2017. They had a pleasant day trip “beneath a luxuriant canopy of trees,” with “graceful Spanish moss adding to the primitive atmosphere.” I can picture it. But, post-Helene, here’s what we encountered in those same 10 miles: around 100 hurricane-downed trees spanning the channel. On our trip Brier Creek was not “problem free,” it was “problem tree’d.” And, as we discovered, every downstream reach Welander covers in her book was similarly blocked, except for the very last one. The creek was so clogged with tree trunks that local fishermen will probably not be able to cut them out. It will take years of natural rotting and high water to open up Brier Creek again. Or the Army Corp of Engineers and their heavy machinery.

For us, paddling Brier Creek really meant pushing, pulling, and paddle-poling our loaded canoes under, around, through, and over one toppled tree after another. Much of “the luxuriant canopy” that Welander says shaded the channel in 2017 now looks you right in your face. It wasn’t until the afternoon of the fifth day that we began to enjoy stretches of open water and felt confident that we were finally leaving Helene’s destruction behind.

It did not take me long to see that 95% of the toppled trees were of two kinds: tall, mature water oaks and laurel oaks growing on Brier Creek’s banks. I recall coming on only one overturned bald cypress tree, and not a single water tupelo. Cypresses and tupelos grow in the mushiest soil, but they are built and anchored to ride out storms.

Here’s one reason we could made progress down Brier Creek’s clogged channel: Almost all of the toppled oaks were not broken off at the trunk but uprooted, and their root balls were gigantic—20 feet high and 30’wide, shaped like huge platters stood up on edge. And these root balls, also called tip-up mounds, tore out equally big holes in the river bank where the trees had stood—holes that the river then filled with water. And these water-filled holes sometimes provided us with a way to get around the toppled trees themselves. Think of it as if you are driving down an interstate and come to some kind of blockage, but then get around it by pulling off into a rest stop and driving out the other end onto the highway again. Brier Creek’s single lane had root balls for rest stops, and they saved us from having to laboriously pull our loaded canoes over many trunks.

We could also make headway because the creek had high water—850 cfs starting out at the USGS gauge at the GA 56 bridge. This ample flow, combined with the largely intact cypress-and-tupelo forest on either side of the channel, made it possible at times for us to paddle into the surrounding swamp and skirt especially clogged stretches. Sometimes we simply abandoned the channel and followed a compass bearing through the swamp before emerging into the main channel again a mile or two downstream—only to be confronted by still more fallen oaks. I started the trip liking water oaks but ended it having second thoughts about them.

But even though the going was day-after-day tough, we had good times on Brier Creek too, good times we took time to enjoy! The light from even a small candle is never more appreciated than in the black of night. Also, it didn’t hurt that my companions were good-natured and capable boaters. In five days of strenuous travel, “there never was heard a discouraging word,” to quote the old cowboy song.

In particular, our campsites were isolated, quiet, comfortable, and beautiful. And dry! In a land where there’s “water water everywhere” and not a place to camp, finding dry ground before night was not unimportant—or always certain. The names I wrote on my map to mark some of our campsites reflect the scarcity of places we found to pitch out tents. There was “First Ground Camp,” as in the first ground we reached on the first day. And, after sunset on the fourth day, with the shadows growing long, there was “Just in Time Camp.”

But the most noteworthy name of the entire trip was one I did not coin. It came already printed on my USGS topo map, and it’s a name that I’ll not forget: “Little Hell.”

We reached Little Hell on the second day after struggling through an especially difficult stretch of the creek. We were aiming for Little Hell with the intent of camping there, because, curious name notwithstanding, my map showed it to be a stretch of high ground. But when we reached the place, we discovered it was already occupied. There were half a dozen old fishing shacks and cabins fronting the creek, most of them falling down. The first of these swamp abodes, however, did look lived in. I paddled up to a sign nailed to a tree at the water’s edge and saw a date on it of May 7, 1997. Below that was a warning composed by someone with a kind of poetic flair:

A THIEF HAS INVADED
MY PRIVACY, SO FROM
THIS DAY FORTH,
STEP ON HILL TO
STEAL I WILL
TRY TO KILL

Below that were the scratched initials “JK.” Since all poets value their privacy, and since JK might still be the cabin’s occupant, we decided not to “step on hill.”

The last shack we came to in Little Hell also appeared to be occupied. But when we rounded a clump of cypress trees in the channel, we were greeted by a female mannequin hung by the neck with a steel cable high over the cabin’s small dock. The mannequin’s head was bald, but her eyes were covered by a sun visor pulled low. Her top was bare, except for a man’s tie that hung from her neck below the cruel cable. She was dressed in long pants and boots. The way the she-mannequin’s hands were positioned, I think that at one time they had held a sign, and I wondered if it had lines written by a swamp poet too. Then I spotted the outlines of two more female mannequins. They were sitting in chairs inside the cabin’s screen porch staring out at us. Even though there were no warning verses to read, we got the message.

Although “mannequin shack” stood at the edge of Little Hell’s high ground, with pure swamp spreading out just past it, and although the day was late and we were very tired, and although my map showed no hint of a possible place to camp for a good ways farther, we paddled on.

Oddly, the only stretch of open channel we came to during our first two days on Brier Creek lay along that line of shacks that made up Little Hell. For all her widely destructive power, it appeared that Hurricane Helene had avoided the place—and for good reason! Ironically, because the open stretch came at the end of a difficult day for us, the experience of gliding effortlessly along as we passed Little Hell was heavenly.

No other signs of man on Brier Creek had the creepy feel of Little Hell, and that night we were lucky enough to happen on dry ground a couple of miles farther downstream that turned out to be our favorite campsite. It was an abandoned landing not shown on my topo maps. The landing had been made from sand dredged up from the creek’s channel, and by the size of the trees growing on it, I guessed it was the work of someone a century earlier. It might have been the place where farm families went to fish and swim, to launch small boats, have cookouts, maybe even baptisms. In confirmation of the landing’s age, we uncovered two folding metal chairs almost buried under leaves, and, while setting them up, saw they’d been stamped by the manufacturer: “Maple City Stamp Co., Peoria, IL, Sept. 6, 1920.”

On the fourth afternoon we reached a fallen oak that had an 8-foot-long alligator basking on it, and there was nowhere for us to go but over the trunk. I paddled forward fully expecting the gator to launch itself into the dark water and disappear with a splash. It’s what almost all alligators do when humans approach—including the other Brier Creek gators we encountered. But this alligator was the exception to the rule. It just turned its head and watched as I got out on its tree trunk about 20 feet away and then, with one eye on the gator, pulled my canoe over. Then Bobby and then Keith did the same. I jokingly told Keith that it was always the third one in line that got nailed. It took the three of us around 15 minutes total to get our canoes over the log, one at a time, and the gator never moved. I decided it must have been a relaxed and prosaic alligator, more interested in enjoying the warm sun than in coming up with some poetically menacing way to scare us off. After all, a reptile is nothing but a reptile. It takes a human to be reptilian. We paddled on, and the gator went back to sleep.

If you have a hankering for a memory-filled paddling adventure, Brier Creek will do! Go when the flow at the Waynesboro GA56 bridge is 900-1000 cfs, or even a bit higher. Also, don’t plan to stick to the main channel, but approach the creek as if it’s a 50-mile-long linear swamp. As long as you don’t get lost and have to take out at Little Hell, the going will probably be easier through the forest on either side of the channel. Topo maps and a compass, combined with experience in reading blackwater rivers, will be important. Every so often you can “touch base” with the main channel for reassurance.

Some day I hope to canoe Brier Creek’s last 5 miles before it joins the Savannah. That’s the stretch that lies below the last bridge over Brier Creek, called Branner’s Bridge. Joe Cook, another Georgia guidebook writer, tells me it is a spectacular reach. Plus, Hurricane Helene’s destructive winds probably did not extend that far. But on this trip, Branner’s Bridge was as far as we could go in 5 days.

Brier Creek Facts and Figures

Trip Dates: April 14-18, 2025, plus the night before the trip, spent in Statesboro.

Put-in: GA 56 bridge five miles east of Waynesboro. There was a primitive dirt access on the downstream, river-right side of the bridge.

Take-out: Branner’s Bridge, a dozen miles southeast of the town of Sylvania. Consult Welander’s book and map. There’s a small public park and pavilion just upstream of the bridge on river left, with a grassy bank.

Total trip mileage: 50. That’s river channel miles. Double the figure to account for all the zigzagging and roundabouting and occasional back-tracking that we had to do. As Bobby put it, “This trip has taught me just how many places a canoe can go!”

Weather: Dry, breezy, delightful every day. Brier Creek would be a much harder trip to make in rain.

Shuttle driver: A deputy in the Screven County Sheriff’s Department. He was a reliable man who knew all the highways and byways. We paid him $150 to drop us off and pick us up, using my truck. (In a trip Bobby Simpson and I made on the Savannah in 2024, this man’s brother was our shuttle driver, and he too worked as a deputy in the county, though he’s since moved to another sheriff’s department in the state.)

Guidebook: Canoeing & Kayaking Georgia, 3rd edition, by Suzanne Welander, Menasha Ridge Press.

Mosquito report: Except for the ubiquitous and harmless swamp spiders that drop into your boat when you brush against tree branches, named Tetragnatha elongata, I think, we saw hardly any bugs of any kind. (I know, a spider is not an insect but both of them qualify as “bugs.”)