Nolichucky

Yesterday after a nice morning sleeping at the combo campground/ trailer park/ river takeout, Sarah and Dave drove around to try to find information about the Nolichucky. They ended up at a hostel, speaking to a man about nothing really. He had no information, but he did inform us that we couldn?t buy wine anywhere in the county (dry county). We then learned that he had Celiac Disease when he was young, but he grew out of it?ending with ?well, I think I grew out of it cause, well I won?t go there.? It could have been Sarah?s cure! Yet the side affects of assumed said-cure was loss of teeth. After a yummy breakfast with the last of the Moeckel eggs : ( we loaded up our playboats on to Sarah?s car and drove to the Nolichucky put in. We had Don from the campsite to bring our car back from the put in because it was a 45 minute drive each way and our journey with him was quite the southern experience, to say the least. With a hardly intelligible southern drawl Don relayed stories to us of how Erwin Tennessee was the only town to ever try and hang an elephant for murder. No joke. Let us add right here that another small fact that we had learned about Erwin Tennessee, our home for the past two nights, is that in the town of 4,600 people there are 66 Baptist churches not including the church of god, Methodist churches etc. We?ll let you draw your own conclusions. We heard other stories from Don, which we don?t feel would be appropriate or politically correct to repeat in writing. We arrived at the put-in in North Carolina and unloaded the vehicles quickly so that Don could drive it back. However we managed to unload 5 paddles in our effort to be quick and did not realize this until Mr. Don had already departed. Now 4 people, 4 boats and 5 paddles does not add up quite right and for once we were a bit over prepared. While the problem of having 5 paddles far superior to the problem of having 3 paddles it is still an extra (and rather cumbersome) piece of fiberglass that one cannot easily stash in the back of a playboat. Fortunately the Purdue Outing Club had also chosen St. Patrick?s Day to paddle down the Nolichucky River and when their shuttle car returned they kindly offered to take our paddle for us so that we would collect it from them at the bottom of our run. Once we finally got on the river this ?southern classic? certainly lived up to its name although we all also agreed that it looked very much like it should be a river out west. It carved through steep mountains valleys and huge boulders that seemed to have fallen off of the mountain sides were scattered throughout the river creating some exciting river features. A railroad grade was the only sign of civilization along the entire river and every half hour or so the eerie rumbling train would pass us by. The first couple miles provided the most excitement and opened the run with a bang as Sarah and Jane adjusted to running rivers in their play boats again and Jane was reminded that her boat has the edges of a surf board as her stern spend more time submerged than above water?.well not quite. After the initial big water the river mellowed out some and we played around dodging rocks and hopping on big wave trains. None of us had ever crossed state lines on a river before and we can now check that one off of our list. The last mile or so we more floated than paddled as we rafted up next to each other and bobbed along enjoying the scenery. It was a beautiful river and a fun little run but one of the major highlights was the fact that we could paddle right up to our campsite at the end of the day and into a nice hot shower.