This week was a bit of a freedom fest for me. School is out, my business of the summer hasn't yet really kicked in, and so I had 1 week to basically do what I wanted. On the docket was a rock climbing trip to Crowder's Mountain, and 2 paddling trips on Cedar Creek.
Wednesday I met Kelley for lunch at Colonial Insurance across town. We went to this really hip deli near her work. The place had scripture quotes painted on the walls and the atmosphere was really relaxed. The staff seemed to be some guys of rough backgrounds that were kind of turning things around for themselves and doing a great job. They kept the drinks filled and were very polite. Service was top-notch.
After lunch I met Kelley's co-workers....who were pretty cool. Oh...I also got fussed at by Colonial Public Safety because my canoe was sticking off the back of the truck into the parking lot. She made a huge deal out of it, and it really wasn't a big deal. Anyway. After I said goodbye to Kelley I headed off to Cedar Creek.
It's a small creek that is a distributary of the Congaree River. It branches from the Congaree somewhere in the vicinity of the Congaree Swamp proper and heads south. It's usually a relatively decent sized creek.....about 5-10 feet deep in most places. It's part of the floodplain ecosystem, though, so when it rains, the creek floods very high and leaves the confines of the creek bank to flow into the floodplain forest around it. When this happens, you can literally take your canoe into the trees around the creek and paddle all throughout the floodplain.
This week, though, the creek was very low. 1-3 feet deep at best. It made for a fun journey, though, because I had to scramble over logs to get upcreek.
I saw 1 great barred owl that day and the highlight was when I caught a watermocasin (cottonmouth) snake with my snake caliper. I was stoked! So far my venomous snake roster includes a rattlesnake, a copperhead, and now the cottonmouth. He was surprisingly docile until I got the caliper behind his neck. I have some really great video footage of it.......but I dropped my camera in the water and it's yet to let me get the footage off. I know I know.....dorf goes paddling.
2 days later I returned to Cedar Creek, this time with fellow climbing expert Scott Bolte. We paddled further upcreek than I had been 2 days earlier and mastered the art of getting the canoe over dead falls and brush brambles. In the process of our adventure, we saw 9 Great Barred Owls (including the one in the picture which was actually the smallest we saw all day). Check out the wingspan on that guy.
Sorry if the pic is fuzzy, but it was hard to get close, and I lucked out with the action shot.
also saw 4 snakes, mostly brown water snakes yellow bellied water snakes. The last one we saw is in the picture below and was enormous. As big around as my forearm and about 4-5 feet in length. He (or she) had just eaten a large fish meal and was relaxing and digesting on the log. I could barely lift the snake with my snake sticks. Fun times.
In the process of all this, my mind wanders to humanity's current state (and my own at that) of fascination with information acquisition and delivery through electronic methods. The internet, movies, TV, iPods, blogging, podcasting, etc. etc. How many of us make the opportunity for ourselves to experience life in its primal beauty. A paddling trip to the swamp might seem to most to be an undesireable activity that they wouldn't take part in unless it was on some reality show where they get 1 million dollars if they do well. By sharp contrast, Scott and I wanted to paddle upcreek, just for the reward of experiencing that which we previously had not. Each bend in the creek brought about new and exciting things.......a school of feeding gar, a flock of mating cardinals, massive cyprus and water tupelo trees, and whatever else we saw that we couldn't burn into our memory.
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