Gasconade Float June 29, 2009

Snoop, Terrie, Jeff Gasconade Float


Woot! Woot! Our first float of the year! We grabbed the "Joe Whiz" fiberglass canoe off of Jeff's carport and loaded up on Shorty's truck. Shorty dropped me, Terrie, and Jeff off at the Barlow access of the Gasconade River and we floated to Hazelgreen Bridge. Hazelgreen Bridge is a stretch of original Route 66 pavement and I was excited about floating underneath it. The Gasconade is one of the crookedest rivers in the world and we have floated sections of it several times before, but this was a new stretch for all 3 of us. Not a lot of pictures from this float because we only had one cell phone with us and it didn't come out of the ziploc bags unless we were on dry land. This was a nice peaceful float even though we had 3 canoes behind us that were floating to Gasconade Hills Resort.



Thanks to my incredibly small bladder, and the help of three or four Busch Lights, we stopped at a gravel bar just in time to see a "chest high, knock your ass out of the boat" tree across the right channel of the river. After much debate and scouting downstream we decided to walk the canoe through the much narrower left channel. We waited for the first canoe of the other group, flagged them down, alerted them to the danger, and took off splashing through the rough water. We stopped at a gravel bar before the last eddy before the Hazelgreen Bridge and the sound of text messages coming in on Jeff's phone let us know that we were close to civiliization. The text message was about the death of Michael Jackson. We spent the last eddy debating among ourselves as to if the text was a hoax. The last eddy before Hazelgreen is LONG! With the recent flood waters receding the river was actually running backwards up the eddy so Terrie and Jeff got their paddles wet so we could get back to the truck and load up. On the drive home we learned that the King of Pop had indeed died and that everyones favorite "Angel", Farrah Fawcett had also passed. Sad news to end a beautiful day getting back to nature.