Day 324: Although this trip has been in the planning for the last couple of weeks, I had not realized that four years had passed since the last time I paddled the Tilton Canyon. Accessed via Ike Kinswa State Park, the route begins where the Tilton empties into Mayfield Lake. Progressing roughly eastward for half a mile, the waterway restricts abruptly into a steep-walled, narrow canyon for a quarter mile, then to open out onto this scene where the river splits into two channels. In previous years, I've turned left here, and so I did yesterday, only to find myself blocked from further passage by a log jam another half mile up. Coming back, I rounded the point of the gravel-bar "island" and continued on my journey. A small riffle posed a challenge. I nearly succeeded in paddling through it, but the current in the last three feet was such that I could only hold my ground, despite paddling as furiously as I could. I let the flow take me back downstream fifty yards, got out on the shingle and dragged the kayak in shallower water until I was beyond the riffle. Even so, I only reached my usual turn-around point, and I ran aground where the channel was again blocked by logs. There, the island was too weedy for me to portage, and in any event, I'd only have gained a few hundred feet before another riffle would have presented a new and possibly insurmountable obstacle. I ate lunch on the island, documented invasives, and then "shot the rapids" down the little riffle to return to this basin. Then it was back to the canyon, around another small island, and home, feeling that September Morn had indeed been well-spent.
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