Kayak Kraze on the Kickapoo!

It would be mighty unusual if you drove down Main Street of La Farge on any of these late summer days without seeing a kayak.  Now I realize there has been a kayak hanging in an advertising display at the Z-Zip Stop for several weeks of these summery September days of 2015.  But not counting that red kayak hanging above the gas pumps, you still would probably see a kayak hanging on top of a vacationer’s car or plopped in the bed of a pickup.  All of those kayaks are headed for the Kickapoo River for a summer c(k)ruise.  (Pardon the alliteration in use here. I just can’t help myself when it comes to this kooky Kickapoo kayak kruise kraze.  Again, I apologize.)

            It appears to me that the kayak has really caught on this summer as the new aquatic vehicle of choice for floating on the Kickapoo.  The kayak has been seen more and more frequently here in the Kickapoo Valley in recent years, to the point that now it seems to rival the canoe as the conveyance of choice for maneuvering on the waters of the Kickapoo.

            Maneuvering might be the key to the kayak’s upsurge in usage on our “Crooked River”, the Kickapoo.  The river is notorious for sharp turns, bottom-scraping shallow water, snags of all descriptions, fallen trees to twist around and numerous sand and gravel bars to traverse over and/or around.  This makes for difficult going for even the most experienced tandem paddlers in a canoe.  Indeed many a friendship or family fondness has been shattered by the cursing and screaming of “No, No, you idiot, paddle the other way!” and “Back up you imbecile, we’re now hung up on this snag!” 

With a kayak, it’s a simple right stroke here, back some water here, bring the rear around this way and one glides past the troubles in those roiling waters of the Kickapoo.  Beaming kayakers gliding gleefully past the marooned cursing canoeists, stuck on the snarling snags.  Life is good in an easily maneuvered kayak.

Cost is also a factor here in comparing the kayak’s continuing climb in popularity for use on the Kickapoo.  A brand new beauty of a kayak can be had for a couple of hundred dollars at area purveyors of plastic aquatic conveyances.  If you want to go top-end on your kayak purchase, doubling that amount will bring you a craft with all the bells and whistles like AM/FM radio, power windows and electro-magnetic depth finder plum-bob. 

So, canoes are less maneuverable and more expensive than kayaks.  Since canoes are larger than kayaks and generally need two to paddle, that’s a given, I guess.  But let us not too soon trumpet the ultimate demise of the canoe as the conveyance of choice on the Kickapoo.  After all, you must remember that kayaks have very little if any storage capability.  Since some groups of people who canoe the Kickapoo are very interested in floating along with the current while consuming adult beverages and snarling down salty snacks, the canoe’s ability to safely store coolers and such will probably always be needed. 

After all, fifty years ago, very few would have thought that the canoe could adequately navigate the tortured torrents and stupefying snags of the muddy river.  Indeed, native Kickapoogians avoided navigating on their river at all costs.  (I’m reminded of a story that Roy Stone told me years back of when he and a friend tried to float down the Kickapoo.  Then boys in their teens, the two set out from Rockton in a flat-bottomed duck boat to catch some trout.  When I asked Roy how the fishing had been on that trip, he guffawed and said there never was any time to fish.  The two lads had to spend all their time keeping the boat from going aground and getting caught up on snags.  As they were trying to float down the river, they had to portage around several huge blockages in the river caused by fallen trees and accumulated flood trash.  By the time that the weary boys climbed out of the river at Bacon’s Bridge just above La Farge several hours later, they had HAD IT with any thoughts of floating on the Kickapoo.  Years later, Roy related this story to me as we sat and consumed adult beverages in the Rockton Bar one Saturday afternoon and watched as a couple of dozen folks were heading out to canoe the Kickapoo.)

In May 1962, two canoes containing three men and three boys floated down the Kickapoo River from Rockton to Tunnelville south of La Farge.  The group of canoeists was from Pewaukee, Wisconsin and had canoed on many different rivers and streams in the state.  “They said they especially enjoyed the scenery in this part of the state and that it was one of the most beautiful trips they had made.”  The quoted sentence is from a front-page article in the May 31, 1962 issue of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper.  That’s right; for anybody to canoe the Kickapoo was so rare that it made front-page headlines in the local paper.

Later that year, Congress passed the bill authorizing the La Farge Dam Project and soon professors and students from Madison were canoeing the Kickapoo looking for rare plant species and archeological wonders.  Everyone enjoyed those voyages so much, they returned for more.  The word got out that a canoe trip on the Kickapoo could be a pretty neat thing.  Soon canoes were being rented out at the Beauti-View Resort in Wildcat Park near Ontario and at Smith’s Landing south of La Farge.  The canoe craze on the Kickapoo had begun.

Now all the main canoe livery businesses on the northern Kickapoo rent out kayaks as well as canoes.  The Kickapoo Yacht Club based out of Rockton has rented kayaks for a few years now and most weekends has them all rented out, as do most of the rental outfits at Ontario.  As the demand for the one-person float craft increases, more kayaks will need to be purchased as the Kickapoo Kayak Kraze Kontinues!

Canoeing The Kickapoo

The month of June has been a tough one for visitors to the northern Kickapoo Valley who are looking to do some canoeing on the river.  There has been so much rain over the past two months that has saturated the ground in these parts, that any rain amount in the last few weeks has regularly sent area creeks to bank full status.  So, Weister Creek, Otter Creek, Bear Creek and the other area tributaries empty their full loads of water into the Kickapoo and soon the river is bank full or even out of its banks.  With so much rain in June, the Kickapoo has been high all month and not much good for canoeing.

            I happened to notice a group of campers at La Farge’s Village Park on a recent Saturday morning.  All of the vehicles at the campsites seemed to have two or more kayaks or canoes piled on top.  With the heavy rain of Friday evening continuing into that Saturday morning, canoeing or kayaking on the Kickapoo became a risky venture and that group stayed in camp throughout the morning.  (Later on that Saturday, in the evening, fifteen canoes were stranded in the high waters between Bridges 6 & 7 north of Rockton.  Eventually, those people needed rescue from the high waters by local emergency personnel.)

            Today, canoeing the Kickapoo has become a recreational summer staple for locals and visitors alike. But when I was growing up in La Farge a half of a century ago, it was unheard of to attempt to canoe on the Kickapoo River.   What has brought about this transformation in the recreational use of the river?  What is different about the Kickapoo today that affords thousands of recreational and sport canoeists to travel on its silt-laden waters?  Let’s go back and take a look.

            Several years back I was sitting at the Rockton Bar with Roy Stone.  Roy had dropped in for a bottle of “medicine” and I was there for lunch and to find out what was happening in the world.  There were maybe twenty young folk, clad in t-shirts, bathing suits and flip-flops getting ready to take off on an afternoon canoe adventure.  As we watched the group prepare for their afternoon of paddling the Kickapoo, Roy offered a story about an experience that he had on the river when he was a young lad.

            Although he didn’t give an exact date, Roy’s adventure on the Kickapoo probably happened in the 1930’s.  He and a friend hatched up an idea to get a boat and go fishing on the river for some big trout.  Roy said that they knew the best fishing holes on the river were far off the highway, so drifting down the Kickapoo on a summer afternoon was the trick to reaching those big Rainbows.  Roy’s friend had a small flat-bottomed duck boat of sorts with a couple oars.  They figured it would be dandy for making the trip.  They would float down to La Farge, fishing along the way, fill up their gunnysacks with big trout and then catch a ride with someone coming back upriver their way.  Roy talked his Mom into making a lunch for the trip and the two Rockton boys were off on their fishing adventure on the Kickapoo.

            They put in below the Rockton mill and headed down river.  They immediately came to a fallen tree blocking the river and had to portage around it.  They no more got there little boat back into the water then they came to another blockage and had to do another portage.  And so it went for several hours as the boys did more carrying their boat than paddling it.  At some of the smaller obstructions, they tried to maneuver their little boat through the trash and snags.  More than once, their boat ended bottom side up in the water, dumping the passengers into the muddy waters.  Their lunches were lost and the fishing was forgotten.

By the time they reached the Star Valley flats, the two teenage boys were soaked and beaten and hadn’t achieved the halfway point in their trip.  They pulled and pushed their boat over and through numerous snags and fallen trees as they tried to float the meanders on the flat.  The banks were so steep in that section of the river, that the boys eschewed portages and virtually walked their boat down the clogged river.  Roy said it seemed like they pulled their boat for miles through water too shallow to float the little craft.  By the time they reached Bacon’s Bridge (the Reserve’s Covered Bridge today), they had all of the river that they could take and hauled their boat out.  Far from the village that was their original ending point, the boys sat glumly, beaten by the snarls of the Kickapoo.  Wet, tired, muddy, and forlorn, the two must have been a pair to behold.

Suddenly a Model – A pickup came putting down off Norris Ridge to the south and crossed the bridge.  It was a neighbor heading back up river.  He stopped and asked the boys what they had been up to.  When he heard their story of woe, he smiled and told them to get in.  The back of the Ford was full of ground feed, so the boat would have to wait for another time, so off they went, back home to Rockton.

Roy never did know how the boat was returned, nor did he care.  When I asked if they had caught any fish, he guffawed as only Roy could do and said they hardly had time to get a line in the water.  “We never caught a dang one,” is how I remember Roy telling it.  As we watched that day in Rockton as the young folk headed out to canoe the Kickapoo, he still remembered that awful afternoon on the Kickapoo from over seventy years before and wondered why anyone would want to canoe that river.

I grew up in La Farge nearly twenty years after Roy’s little adventure, but I remember no canoeing on the river of any kind.  It’s not as if we didn’t hangout on the river.  As a kid, we fished off the old dam at Seelyburg and dropped our worms by the power plant there.  We skated on Darrell Hollenbeck’s Slough next to the river in the wintertime.  I speared carp in that slough a couple of times – a Rite of Spring on the Kickapoo carried over from the old days.  My friends and I were in the Boy Scouts, so we did lots of outdoors stuff and activities, but we steered clear of canoeing on the Kickapoo River.

It wasn’t like we were adverse to the activity.  When Scout Master Harry Lounsbury took us up to Camp Decorah on the Black River, we learned canoeing skills on the lake at the camp and then took our canoes out for an afternoon trip on the river. It was great fun.  But we didn’t canoe the Kickapoo because, as Roy and his friend found out, it wouldn’t be great fun.

In Scouts we even built our own canoe! It was a project that the scout troop tackled in the garage of assistant Scout Master Arnie Widstrand.  We worked on assembling the wood strut frame and covering it with canvas as a winter project.  We admired our canoe in the spring, but didn’t take it out on the Kickapoo.  Harry loved to fish at Petenwell Flowage on the Wisconsin River over by Mauston and it seems to me that we took the canoe over there to use.  I don’t know what happened to that canoe – hope Royce Gudgeon didn’t take it out on the Kickapoo.

Kevin Alderson and his group of friends came through La Farge’s Scouting program soon after.  They also built a canoe, but I’ll have to tell of the fate of that craft in the next entry.  We’ll continue this paddle through the past about canoeing the Kickapoo next time.