Where are the PUT INS on Kentucky Rivers?
A Turn Around on the Kentucky River
Kentucky is
crisscrossed with miles and miles of rivers but canoeing on them can sometimes
feel like you are solving a puzzle. Where can you put in? Where can
you take out? What is the security at each spot like? Is the access close to the river? Even after you think you have done enough
research to spend some time on the river, even when you think you have
identified the take out spot in a book, we find that the available literature
and the river reality are quite different things.
Armed
with the Kentucky Atlas (Topo maps of the entire state), a booklet called
"Kentucky's Boating and Fishing access sites" put out by the Kentucky
Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, and the book "A Canoeing and
Kayaking Guide to Kentucky" by Bob Sehlinger and Johnny Molloy we thought we had all that we needed to know!
We wanted
to canoe in pool 2 from Big Twin Creek bridge on Hwy 355 to General Butler
State Park. It took us a few turn arounds to find the put in on Twin
Eagle Creek Bridge on Hwy 355. It was hidden by overgrown brush and not
real near the bridge itself. Headed north on Hwy 355, it is on the left
side of the road after the bridge over the creek. There is paved put in
with a small parking lot. Parking and
river access are good.
We then
traveled to General Butler State Park to leave a car at the take out. The
"Canoeing and Kayaking Guide to Kentucky" has only a vague arrow
pointing to a takeout place off of Hwy 227. Kentucky's Boating and
Fishing Access Sites listed General Butler State Park take out with directions
saying "KY 227 to park". When we asked several General Butler
staff about where the access to the Kentucky River was located in the park,
they had NO IDEA. They had no idea that the park's boundaries even
included the Kentucky River. They could tell us about the Ohio River, but
not the Kentucky River! After searching for 1/2 hour, we decided to
forget trying to find a takeout spot. We had small children in our group and it
was getting late and so it would be difficult to canoe the 8 miles before dark.
This experience doesn't say much for the staff or literature telling us about
the natural resources in our own state.
We drove
back to Big Twin Creek, where the rest of our canoeing group was waiting.
This access requires canoeing several hundred feet on the creek before reaching
the Kentucky River. We chose to paddle upstream 2 miles and then float back to
the put in. That was our big turnaround. We were introducing our
grandsons to the adventure of canoeing, but also introducing their parents to
the realities of getting on a river in Kentucky.
The
Kentucky River in pool 2 is a wide slow river, with wooded banks of sycamore
and silver maple, sometimes called water maple. The banks were muddy and
were sloping to steep. Behind the banks were fields. Even so, the
deer were plentiful. In that short 2 mile stretch we saw 7 deer,
including 3 fawn.
The water
and life within the water was less encouraging. It was muddy (generally
expected since we are in the rainy season), but we couldn’t even begin to deal
with the islands of floating trash. We usually pick up the occasional
piece of floating trash to help clean our rivers. It is a good reminder that anything littered
in the Kentucky River Basin will build into mounds of trash as the litter
travels along the flowing waters. Picking up the trash was a good way to
introduce our grandsons to why it is important to clean up the river. This
river did not give us a pleasant view. We saw some alligator gar along
the way but we saw no turtles and very few birds. Makes us wonder. We have been working to canoe as much of the
Kentucky River that we can but this trip, compared to our other trips, left a
lot to be desired.
Even so,
it was good to be on the river and to enjoy the float.
