Redhorse Access to River 'Round Conservation Area

The weather, while still unusually cool, was finally beginning to lean toward Spring.  Our next chance to get out on the Meramec River would be Saturday, April 6th.  The forecast said we'd actually reach the 70s for once!  I decided we'd try the next section upstream, the 16 miles from the Redhorse Access to the River 'Round Conservation Area.  Like always, I got the map ready, we bought food and drinks, we packed, and went to bed early the night before.

We arrived a few hours earlier than normal.  It would be the longest trip we'd attempted so far and I was unsure how long it would take us.

The river was maybe a foot higher than normal, if that, and unusually clear compared to where it runs through our town.  There was around 3 feet of visibility.  The boatramp at the Redhorse Access led into a deep spot that was wide, but not too wide.  There were lots more rocks and far less mud than at most points of the river that we'd seen so far.  From the elevated top of the boatramp, straight out from the its tip, about 40 feet into the river, we could see the great big, wide, white head of a boulder just beneath the surface with the water gently gurgling and bubbling all around.

I inflated the raft, packed up, kissed the wife and son goodbye, and pushed us off.

When I was researching the course of the river for this trip on googlemaps I kept noticing long stretches of shimmering water for much of the first half of the trip.  I assumed that googlemaps had just happened to have gotten their images when the wind was blowing or something.  There couldn't be THAT many rapids and for that long!

Yeah, there actually could!

While these rapids weren't dangerous, they were mainly clear with very little debris, the water was very, very fast.  It was like the whole river was spread out really wide and squished to a foot or two deep rushing over a huge gravel bar for long stretches.  It was cool to watch the rocks beneath us just zip by, but occasionally we chose the wrong path and ended up getting the raft stuck in ankle deep water over a particularly shallow spot.  There were some sections where the river hit a gravel bar and just went every which way.  Sometimes there would be as many as 5 paths!

After a few miles of those shallow rapids, we came across a dredging machine, which had obviously been doing its work.  The river quite jarringly deepened and uniformly widened, and the current nearly completely stopped.  It was like floating across an extremely long, 100 foot wide lake that had no current.  I had to do a ton of paddling.  At least it was very clean and mostly free of debris.

Soon we came across the highway 47 bridge.  It marked the 1/3rd point of our trip.  There was a private ramp and we saw a few boaters here.  They were all nice enough to slow down for us.  But with fairer weather, this was just going to become something we were going to have to deal with.  Luckily for us, the wind had really started to gust from behind us, which was shoving us down the river at a surprising clip!  There was almost no need to paddle for quite a ways!

We came across this gorgeous overhanging shelf and spent a while just drifting underneath it, feeling the rock and looking up above our heads at all the cool, smooth, intricate surfaces, wondering how deep the rock went, and whether or not there were deep, underwater caves just beneath our feet.  I wish we could have spent so much more time there.  It was beautiful and the air was cool under its natural, stone umbrella.  And the water made that sweet sound like low pitched singing all along where the water met the rock.  It felt like paddling through a cave.

Studying the waterway in googlemaps, I had noticed a fairly sharp, 180 degree bend in the river right around the halfway point of our planned journey.  I could see some beaches and knew there had to be some bluffs to force the river to bend to its will like that.  I figured that would be a good place to stop and have lunch.  Boy did I guess right!

The beach just seemed to go on forever, and there were gorgeous bluffs on the other side.  The river just barreled around that corner, churning and gurgling over unseen boulders below.  I paddled in the shallows along the beach until I ran aground.  I got Lilly out and tied up the boat.  She ran up the mountain of millions upon millions of weathered stones.  

As I stood there taking it all in, I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could find any arrowheads here..."  I then looked between my feet.  There was one!  Boy that was easy!  I called Lilly over and explained what I had found, and what arrowheads were, and how they were made, and who made them.  She was amazed that real Native Americans had lived right here, in the middle of nowhere, where we were standing!

I fetched the cooler and my chair and found a place for us to eat, next to a big pile of sand on top of the mountain of gravel, where Lilly had already begun to dig and play.  

It was about this time the wind started to become a problem.  It was great when it was shoving us down the river.  Paddling had been easy.  But these gusts made it difficult to eat.  We couldn't put our food down for a moment, for the wind would gust and blow it away.  I hadn't started to worry yet, but the thought did cross my mind, what's going to happen when the river turns and this wind is gusting against us?

I figured we'd cross that bridge when we got there, and that surely the wind would calm down as the sun got lower.  After eating and letting Lilly play for a bit, I packed everything up, shoved off, and we zoomed around the sharp corner, hugging the inside as well as we could, being propelled by both the gushing current as well as the wind, slamming into the bluffs and turning hard to push us once again.

Soon after, we came to another, much longer, much taller, beautiful line of bluffs.  Here, we met our first fellow kayakers, a group of three.  Two of them stayed behind to fish, while another sort of tagged along for maybe a mile as we journeyed.  This stretch was just gorgeous, but the wind was becoming something of a problem by now.  It was ramming hard into the bluffs and shoving us downstream, not quite, but almost uncontrollably.  The wind said it was time to move on, so we moved on!

A while later we passed under the former, and current, Mill Hill Road bridges.  The old one was dilapidated, but somehow, seeing those boards falling apart was kind of beautiful.  Its amazing that that's how bridges just used to be built!  And then there was the new Mill Hill Road Bridge.  I haven't seen that many bridges that curve like that.  It's unique for this area.

And this is where the wind became a real problem.

Formerly, when I would prepare for a float, I would watch the weather like a hawk.  The two variables I prayed for to be favorable were temperature and precipitation.  As long as it wasn't too cold, and as long as it wasn't raining, we'd be fine.  Or so I thought.  I had never given any thought to wind speed and direction.

We had nearly reached the end of our float.  And so far the wind had just been SHOVING us down the river.  It was very nice.  I didn't have to paddle much at all, except to keep us on course.  But at this point in the trip the river makes a very long, very round circle, a full 360 degrees.  And as soon as we started the turn, we ran smack into the face of those oncoming windgusts which HAD been helping us.

It was horrible.  The wind was just howling in our faces.  I was actually having trouble lifting the paddles and pushing them forward while out of the water, to row.  And row and row and row as I might, in the middle of rapids even, we almost weren't going anywhere.

Later, after finishing the float, a couple on a motorboat pulled up the boatramp and asked us "How on EARTH did you guys make it though that wind?  WE were having trouble in that wind!"  It was just bad, very bad.  Ever since then, we've actually had a few opportunities to float, where the temperature and precipitation were fine, but because there was going to be wind gusts, I just decided against going.  It's all fun and games until it's gusting right in your face, against you.  No thank you.

Along with the towering riverbluffs, we started to see several caves along this stretch too.  Had the river maybe been a bit higher, or had we seen a way to get up those banks, I would have loved to have taken Lilly at least to see them up close.  But it was too dangerous to try to scramble up those banks with her in tow.

Eventually, we made it through those horrible winds and to the boatramp at the River 'Round Conservation Area.  Can you tell I was tired?  I was so tired that I was a bit disoriented at that time.  I kept thinking the ramp would be on the right bank, for some reason.  I guess its because the river makes such an enormous circle.  I remembered beginning one of our previous trips from that very ramp, but I guess I was just too tired by that point.

It was an absolutely fantastic trip.  We rocketed on top of clear water across stretching gravel bars.  We saw more bald eagles, beautiful bluffs, umbrellas made of stone, and endless beaches littered with millions of smooth stones.  We found arrowheads, and saw old-timey wooden bridges.  We battled the wind itself and won!  Although there had been a handful more motorboats and kayakers than before, we still went miles and hours without having to share the river with anyone but the two of us.  The 16 miles from Redhorse to River 'Round were some fantastic, beautiful, memorable miles!

Oh, and as an addendum, there was a time when I would see people loading and unloading their flashy, powerful bass boats on the Meramec.  And I'll admit that for a time I was jealous.

Yeah, and then I realized I can do this with my boat and all of my gear.  Oh, and my gas bill while on the river itself is $0.

I'm not jealous anymore.