I know two things about myself: 1) I’m not a purist and 2) I’m a fan of slow, almost inefficient travel methods.
These two attributes probably explain why I was drawn to the AT in the first place. The idea of walking 2,200 miles at a time when automobiles exist is remarkably inefficient. Springer Mountain, Georgia to Katahdin, Maine? It is a 3 day road trip. Boom. Made. FKT unlocked. Move over Scott Jurek and Tara Dower, there’s a new ultra athlete in town.
Who wants that? I’m not exactly dying to get back to the real world.
After hiking the southern half of Shenandoah National Park, I decided it was time to slow down. I mean very low. After 900 miles of traveling on foot with a bloated backpack, it was time to slow the pace to the extreme.
Enter the canoe, that cutting-edge piece of prehistoric technology. I don’t know about you, but when I try to go slow, I reach for the nearest canoe, plant my butt on that webbed seat, and watch the world float away.
Some hikers are purists and must touch every white glow on the trail to achieve total enlightenment. I am not one of these people. I like to think that canoeing part of the trail makes me more of an intrepid explorer than a trickster.
I’d canoed parts of the Shenandoah River before (after all, it’s where my torrid love affair with the Appalachians began), but I wanted a bigger, bolder, slower expedition. I wanted to canoe from Luray to Front Royal. In historically low water conditions.
The good people of Canoe Down River Co. They were happy for this to happen.
After explaining to me that the river was in a state of historic drought, they gave me the green light. Hell, they even picked me up in Luray, dropped me and my trusty boat at the Inskeep Boat Launch, and I got floating before lunchtime.
The first thing you should know about the South Branch of the Shenandoah River is that all those animals you’re supposed to see in the forest are actually in the river. Big birds strutting? Check. Turtles doing turtle things? Check. Rabbits swimming through the river? You better believe it.
The next 48 hours were, to put it mildly, total bliss. My sore and bruised feet had to take a break. My back and shoulders were finally able to decompress without the weight of a backpack. Best of all, I had no real reason to paddle, I let the river do the work for me.
When you’re in a canoe, time turns to molasses and the rush you once felt to reach certain mile markers or get to a certain location dissolves and fades into a warm breeze.
I’m not going to lie, there were some aggravating sections where I kept getting stuck on rocks. That was terrible. But all things considered, it was hard to get too upset about this. If I ever felt frustrated, I could look up at the robin’s egg blue sky and rolling emerald mountains and remember that all of this almost never happened; I could easily be sitting in an office, stuck in traffic, stressing about stupid things, or wasting time worrying about something that probably won’t happen.
After 43 miles, I dragged the canoe to the boat launch in Front Royal and walked into town, a little sunburned, a little hungry, but ready and excited to take on the second half of the trail. So I have that going for me. Which is good.
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