River Exploration in the Southern Appalachians

River Exploration in the Southern Appalachians

By Payson Kennedy

A Carolina Paddler Reprint

Editor’s Note: This writing by Payson Kennedy originally appeared in the book, First Descents, published by Menasha Ridge Press in 1989. Edited by Cameron O’Connor and John Lazenby.  Keep in mind the publication year, 1989.

Payson Kennedy is a familiar name to anyone with even a hint of Southern Appalachian paddling history.  A founder of NOC, a champion racer, a stunt double for the movie Deliverance and a philanthropist, Payson has probably touched more peoples’ lives in the southern paddling community than anyone.

Bob Benner, of CCC lore, is also featured in the article.

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“I vowed then never to go on another river trip.”

In the summer of 1952, Hugh Caldwell was working at Camp Merrie-Woode in the mountains of Southwestern North Carolina. Merrie-Wood was one of the oldest girls’ camps in the South and one of its specialties was canoieing. Most of the trips were on tame water, and Caldwell set out to find some more challenging rivers.

He consulted a highway map and found a river running between South Carolina and nearby Georgia, one a few miles from Merrie-Woode, called the Chattooga. Caldwell had never heard of it, but there were bridges at Georgia 28 and US 76, and the section between them looked to Caldwell like a good length for a day trip.

Unlike most mountain rivers, the Chattooga is very easy at the start, but gets more difficult as you descend it. Caldwell didn’t know that, however, as he started out in his keeled 18-foot Grumman aluminum canoe, not the best craft for a mountain stream. He didn’t know much else about the Chattooga, either, certainly not that in twenty or so years it would be one of the best-known whitewater rivers in the South. He had consulted no topo maps; he was alone; he had no lifejacket. In short, he says, “I violated almost every river standard now in practice.”

Caldwell had a long day. Intermittent heavy rain made things more uncomfortable and raised the river levels. By midafternoon, he had stopped scouting rapids because he was afraid he wouldn’t reach the take-out before dark. He broached once on what was to become known to latter-day boaters as Painted Rock. The Grumman bent but it didn’t fold. It was stuck though, and Caldwell lost much time in freeing it. Then he blundered into the now-famous Bull Sluice. It was near dark. He couldn’t stop to scout so he took what appeared to be the best line. The rapids’ hydraulic caught him, filled the boat and flushed boat and paddler out the bottom chute. Caldwell was only a quarter mile form the takeout he was aiming for, but he didn’t know it. “So I was pretty discouraged,” he says.

It was dark when he finally pulled his canoe up onto the beach at US 76. From the time he started at dawn, he had not seen another human being on the river, that today, on a good weekend, is filled with paddlers.

But that was the way whitewater boating was in the Southeast during the pioneering decades of this century, when rivers were being run for the first time: simple equipment, lots of nerve and energy, and not too much experience. It was a combination that took boaters throught first descents all over the region.

Our historical research revealed, as expected, that dugout canoes built by the Cherokees who inhabited the region were used only for ferrying across the rivers; no accounts exist of their use for transportation up and down the rivers–even on the flatter stretches. Surviving Cherokee canoes and drawings of the dugouts suggest they were probably sluggish to paddle, heavy to portage, and unsuitable for whitewater. Likewise there is little evidence to suggest that the northern Indians or the French trappers traveled to the southeast in their more manueverable and river-worthy birchbark canoes. And we found no record of early explorers or settlers using canoes in their travels in the mountains.

Although whitewater paddling in the Southern Appalachians appears to have begun somewhere before 1914, until the fifties communication between paddlers was limited to the small groups of friends. Hence, it is difficult to determine with any confidence who actually made the first runs on various rivers. Many paddlers made exploratory runs without knowledge of earlier trips. Thus lots of us have had the thrills, challenges, and satisfaction of thinking we might be making first descents.

In researching those days, my richest sources of information were the old-time paddlers themselves, many of whom were associated wth the outstanding canoeing programs at summer camps in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.

One of the undisputed pioneers was Frank Bell, who began canoeing in 1914 as a camper at French Broad Camp in North Carolina. Still active today at 90, Bell has sharp recollections of those early times. In 1914, he made his first river trip down the French Broad from Brevard to Asheville. In 1922 Bell founded Camp Mondamin, in western North Carolina, where whitewater paddling played a prominent role from the beginning. The following year, he organized a trip with a counselor named George Blackburn and three campers that was probably the first descent of the full length of the French Broad–nearly a thousand miles.  The group went down the river from Mud Creek near Hendersonville North Carolina , to the Tennessee and Ohio rivers and on to the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. There was then only one dam on this entire route and the trip took about a month.

Bell canoed with the group through all of the whitewater sections and then returned to his camp duties. In rough water, the loaded cedar and canvas canoes swamped and overturned many times, forcing the paddlers to stop frequently for repairs. Since there was not extra flotation in the canoes and none of the paddlers wore lifejackets, getting themselves and the loaded boats to shore was none too easy. Often, they lost supplies and gear, and replacing them turned into a sort of scavenger hunt as they continued on their way. Since they had no specialized canoeing or camping equipment, they could usually replace things without much difficulty. They carried blankets rather than sleeping bags, a few items of clothing, and a minimal supply of food and cooking equipment. Once Bell used a wagon wheel iron from a blacksmith shop, bent to the shape of the bow to hold the front of a canoe together. He and his companions then carved thwarts from tree limbs and used ropes between the gunwales to hold the sides in. Finally, they patched the leaks with tar.

The most memorable event of the trip for Bell was the attempt to run a difficult rapid near Hot Springs, North Carolina. After scouting it, three of the five paddlers portaged, but Bell and a camper ran it tandem. The canoe filled in the standing waves on the approach and was sucked underwater in a powerful whirlpool. The current pushed the camper toward shore, but Bell, near exhaustion was carried downstream. He had nearly given up, when his foot touched the bottom and he struggled onto the rocks.  Stories of this event made the rounds, and a Class IV rapid about a mile above Hot Springs was named Frank Bell’s Rapid. Oddly enough, Bell is sure that this is not the one he and the camper had overturned in. Since there are no similar rapids in the vicinity he believes that theirs could lie under one of the small dams upstream of Hot Springs.

Fifty years later, in 1973, Bell led another Camp Mondamin group on a trip through the best whitewater section of the French Broad.

On anothr early trip, Bell and Bill Childs made what was probably a first descent of the Green River in North Carolina. They put in below Lake Summit Powerhouse and soon entered a narrow, steep-walled gorge in which the river plunged precipitously over ledges and boulders, at one point dropping more than 300 feet in a mile. Within the first 2 miles, their canoe was completely destroyed and the two continued on foot, walking , scrambling, and swimming the remainder of the 16 Miles to Lake Adger.

Perserverance was an important attribute in those days. When Bell paddled the Tuckaseegee River in southwertern North Caorlina in the 1930’s, before Fontana Dam was built, he and his partner, Billy Pratt, overturnd in a long, powerful rapid and washed through it before they could reach shore. They walked back upstream but were unable to find any sign of thier canoe. Finally they noticed a huge boulder that split the main current, swam to it and began feeling around it with their feet as they held onto the rock and each other. They were able to just touch the pinned canoe, wrapped around the rock underwater. After much tugging and prying, they were able to recover only a few splinted fragments.

As Bell knew, river exploration at the time was a fairly risky and expensive endeavor, tough on canoes and paddlers alike. The canoes were not only much more fragile than today’s, but they were comparatively much more expensive.  A cedar and canvas Old Town cost about $150 then. But Bell said he could employ as many laborers as he needed at the camp for ten cents an hour, so a canoe represented 1,500 hours of labor. At least the accessories were cheap: no special flotation or outfitting, no lifejackets, helmets or special clothing were used. The only equipment, other than the boat, was a paddle, usually a surprisingly long one. Bell keeps a 6-foot-two-inch spruce paddle in his living room as a memento of the 1923 French Broad trip.

When they finally arrived on the scene, aluminum canoes made exploration easier, but they sometimes fared no better than canvas ones. Hugh Caldwell remembers an early run on the Chattoooga in which he ran the rapid called Jawbones with Fritz Orr, Jr., Al Barrett, and Bunny Johns (then Bunny Bergin, a canoeing counselor at Merrie-Woode). He waited below to photograph Orr making the run. Orr’s canoe came through upside down and went over the next drop, Sock-Em-Dog. He was all right, but when Caldwell scrambled over the boulder to catch the boat on the washout there was no canoe. “It had simply disappperared,” said Caldwell. Half an hour later a canteen that had been tied to the canoe appeared downstream. “With darkness approaching,” said Caldwell, “We gave up on the lost canoe. One more rapid and we were in Lake Tugaloo. The next day we came back with ropes and grappling irons but found no trace of our lost canoe.”

River exploration was hard on the paddlers, too. In 1933 Bell led a Mondamin trip that began below the Green River Gorge and continued down the Green to the Broad, the Congareee, the Santee and on to the Atlantic. After leaving the Green’s whitewater, they encountered a problem that few whitewaer paddlers have to worry about today: several of them developed malaria. Caldwell remembers for days after his first trip on the Chattooga his elbow joints were so sore from drawing the cumbersome Grumman that it hurt to raise a glass of water.

From 1934 to 1937 Caldwell spent his summers at Camp Tate, a small camp for boys in the North Georgia mountains. The camp was staffed mainly by men associated with Georgia Tech athletics and people from Springfield College, the YMCA school in Massachusetts. There was a heavy emphasis on swimming and canoeing, with the Springfield contingent providing the canoeing instructions.

In August of 1935, Caldwell recalls, seven campers made a four-day canoe trip from North Georgia to Atlanta. They started on the Chestatee River and went most of the way on the Chattahoochee, which had not yet been dammed to form Lake Lanier. The only adult on the trip and the only one who had ever been on any river was Dr. Tom Cureton, a camp staff member. “He knew nothing, it turned out, of the rivers we were to travel,” Caldwell relates.

The camp had a fleet of wooden, lapstrake Thompson canoes, but for some reason only two were taken on the trip. Four in a canoe, plus food and duffel! Because of numerous difficulties the group spent almost all day getting to the put-in on the Chestatee. “Dr. Cureton had recently purchased a powerful flashlight, and he suggested that we make up lost time by paddling into the night.” Caldwell says. “So we put in at dusk., with Cureton and his powerful flashlight leading the way.”

Things went smoothly for a while, but some time after dark the group reached a rapid. Their boats were out of control, turning round and round and taking in water. Both canoes, howerver, managed to get to the left bank, where their occupants held on to bushes. Fortunately, it had been raining for several days and the high water tended to flatten the rapid. Because of the steep bank and thick bushes it was impossible to land, and because they heard more rapids, Cureton instructed them to tie onto the bushes and await daylght.

Caldwell remembers that summer night as the longest of his life. They couldn’t stretch out in the boats and there was nothing to eat. “I never went to sleep.” says Caldwell. “I vowed then never to go on another river trip.” With dawn we were able to negotiate the remainder of the rapid, land, and make breakfast.”

The group was met in Atlanta three days later by the driver of the camp’s trusty Ford station wagon which returned them to camp.

Caldwell did, of course, go on to make many more canoe trips during his association with summer camps. In 1952, Fritz Orr, Sr., who operated Camp Tate since 1937, purchased Camp Merrie-Woode and that summer Caldwell made his run of the Chattooga.

During the summers of 1952 and 1953, says Caldwell, Ramone Eaton spent his vacations at Merrie-Woods and accompanied the campers on many river trips. Eaton intorduced Caldwell to the beautiful Nantahala River after camp in 1952. “We used to refer to Ray as the ‘Great White Father of White Waters’–partly because he was such a superb canoeist, but mainly because he had been scouting southern rivers since the late 1920’s,” says Caldwell.

Frank Bell described Ramone Eaton as the best paddler he’d ever met. Bell believes that Eaton made first descents on many rivers of the Southern Appalachians. It was Eaton who’d introduced him, too, to the Nantahala River in the late forties and to the Chattooga in the early fifties; he beliveves Eaton was probably the first to run the Nantahala. Randy Carter, a companion of Eaton’s on many early runs, included descriptions of ten rivers of the Carolina Appalachians in the third edition of his classic 1967 guidebook, Canoeing White Water: River Guide.¹

In addition to the North Carolina camps, which had unusually strong whitewater programs, there were many other camps doing whitewter trips and training new canoeists. Both Bob Benner and I began our whitewater paddling as counselors at the Atlanta YMCA’s Camp Pioneer in the mountains of North Georgia. There Hub Dowis, an Atlanta school teacher, led a canoeing and tripping program for many years. In 1951 I made a three day, 73 mile canoe trip led by Hub on the Chattahoochee River from the vicinity of Clarkesville, Georgia, to the Roswell Road bridge outside of Atlanta. I suspect Hub knew the river well. At the time of our trip, Georgia’s Buford Dam had not yet been built and I recall portaging a breached mill dam that is now covered by Lake Lanier and which several of us wanted to try running. I also remember losing several hours’ paddling time one afrternoon while we stopped to make repairs to one of the cedar and canvas canoes–it had been damaged by hitting rock in a way that we would  have thought little about had we been in one of today’s plastic boats. Use of the wooden canoes placed a premium on attempting only those rapids that you were confident you could run successfully.

Like many other “old-time paddlers” I have run a number of small streams which, as far as I know, had not been paddled previously. The only one that is memorable is Silvermine Creek. Those who have been to the Nantahala may remember it as the small stream entering the river at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, which can normally be walked across without getting your feet wet.

During the winter of 1972-73, our first at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the rains came in January in a way that made me consider the advisibility of starting work on an ark. My recollections is that we got 17 inches during the month. We were living in the motel on the bank of the Silvermine Creek and listened to the creek’s roar through the night as it rose out of its banks. Finally one morning my daughter Frances and I decided it was runnable. It was a short fun beginning below the campground and ending at the Nantahala. So far as I know it hasn’t been repeated. Hazards included low bridges, downed trees, briars, barbed-wire fences, and one outhouse extending over the stream.  The turn into the culverts under Highway 19 proved the most difficult challenge of the morning and we left one kayak wrapped around the concrete. So much for personal river exploration.

Bob Benner, a founder of the Carolina Canoe Club and author of Carolina Whitewater ², made a number of first descents of lesser-known creeks and rivers of the Carolinas as he scouted streams for inclusion in his guidebooks. Ray McLeod, who accompanied Benner on several scouting trips, suggested that Benner is thought to have made first descents of Doe River, Big Laurel Creek and Wilson’s Creek, among others.

Another name that deserves mention here is Walter Burmeister, whose guidebook Appalachian Waters was published in 1962³. The original two-volume edition covered more than 200 rivers of the Appalachians. Volume Two includes descriptions of approximately 60 river of the Southern Appalachian region. Amazingly, Burmeister described not just the popular whitewater runs but their entire navigable length, a truly monumental effort. In an American Whitewater article in 1960⁴, Burmeister says that he began his scouting trips in 1939 and spent 20 years scouting and compiling river descriptions. I suspect that he and his single foldboat made many first descents.

On the western side of the mountains summer camps played a less prominent role in early canoeing , and river running may thererfore have developed somewhat later. Reid Gryuder of the East Tennessee White Water Club (ETWWC) in Oak Ridge reports that the earliest runs were made by John Bombay and members of the  Club. Bombay was a California kayaker and safety chairman of the American Whitewater Affiliation who moved to Oak Ridge (the site of atomic energy research, the Manhattan Project) and organized the ETWWC about 1961. In his safety column in the summer 1962 issue of American Whitewater, he commented that so far he’d met mainly “canoeists with little boating experience…. the ones that have most need for our safety column” and had “discovered that most canoeists out here in Tennessee had never heard of a decked canoe.”⁵

In the same issue, Bombay described an explortatory trip ont the south Fork of the Cumberland river with two members of the newly formed ETWWC⁶. In the winter 1962/63 issue, Bombay descibes a trip on the French Broad with three professors from the University of Tennessee. His description of Frank Bell’s Rapid, which may have been the rapid of Bell’s memorable swim and which has become a favorite play spot for local boaters, provides an interesting indication of the changing skill levels in the 25 years since Bombay wrote. He rates it as a Class VI and says:

  “When approaching Hot Springs, the roar of a cascading waterfall will become noticeable. The drop here is approximately 20 feet in four irregular stages. I studied this fall and found it could be run by a very expert boater–some world-champion whitewater rat.”⁷

Today, on Nantahala Outdoor Center guided trips, we sometimes take first-time paddlers through that rapid in inflatable kayaks.

River exploration prior to World War II was limited by the relative fragility and expense of the cedar and canvas canoes used. Even though the wooden canoe was actually tougher than many folks believe, it definitely couldn’t take the abuse to which many of today’s outstanding paddlers subject their plastic boats. Venturing into an unknown mountain stream in a wooden canoe would give one reason to pause and reflect. With the advent and quick acceptance of the cheaper and tougher aluminum canoes, river exploration rapidly increased.

Not until the late sixties and early seventies did kayaks and decked canoes become common. During the fifties and sixties many of the lesser-known streams of the southern mountains were explored.

At the same time, communication between paddlers broadened dramatically.  American Whitewater began publication in 1955 and was received by a growing number of Southern paddlers. The East Tennessee White Water Club was followed by the Georgia Canoeing Association in 1967. [The Carolina Canoe Club began in 1969.] By 1972 nine whitewater clubs were listed as American Whitewater Affiliates and a large proportion of whitewater paddlers were acquainted and exchanging river information.

By the seventies and eighties the only remaining unrun streams were a few of the smaller and steeper creeks which in most cases can be run only at unusually high water levels.

NOTES:

1. Randy Carter, Canoeing White Water: River Guide (Oakton, Va.: Appalachian Outfitters 1967)
2. Bob Benner. Carolina Whitewater 4th edition (Hillsborough, NC, Menasha Ridge Press, 1981).
3. Walter Burmeister, Appalachian Waters (Washington D.C.: Published privately by members of the Canoe Cruisers Association, Washington, D.C.,” 1962).
4. Burmeister, “Saga of a Guidebook,” American Whitewater (Vol. V, No. 4) 35-38.
5. John Bombay, American Whitewater (Vol VIII, No. 1) :27.
6. Bombay, “Pioneering a Tennessee River,” ibid: 7-8
7. Bombay, “River Reports: The French Broad.” American Whitewater, Vol VIII. No. 3: 27

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Peter Julius in researching this article, as well as the contributions of several old-time paddlers, particularly Frank Bell and Hugh Caldwell.

-Payson Kennedy, 1989

About Payson Kennedy, from First Descents:

Payson Kennedy began canoeing 47 years ago at a summer camp in the North Georgia mountains and later became a founder and leader of the Georgia Canoeing Association. In 1972 he helped found North Carolina’s Nantahala Outdoors Center, where he is chairman of the board . He was also founder and first president of the the association of Eastern Professional River Outfitters. Payson has won several titles in the National Open Whitewater Championships and has led numerous trips for the NOC in Central America and Nepal.

From Carolina Paddler:

Payson and Aurelia Kennedy formed the NOC with Horace Holden. The NOC has served over five million visitors since its modest beginnings. Payson was elected to the International Whitewater Hall of Fame in the 2005 first class. Aurelia Kennedy died in 2019 on the 65th anniversary of their marriage. Payson lives in Wesser, NC, and continues to be active with the NOC and the paddling world.

Bob Benner, mentioned in the article, was a founder and first President of the Carolina Canoe Club. He wrote some of the early guidebooks to Carolina rivers and inspired authors like David Benner, Paul Ferguson, Ed Gertler and others.

Carolina Paddler thanks Menasha Ridge Press and Adventure Keen for the permission to use this article.

“River Exploration in the Southern Appalachians” by Payson Kennedy first appeared in the wonderful collection, First Descents– In Search of Wild Rivers, edited by Cameron O’Connor and John Lazenby, published by Menasha Ridge Press, in Birmingham, Alabama in 1989.

First Descents is no longer in publication but can be found at many book resellers and if acquired, will be treasured for many years.