Noli & Nanty: Getting back to “normal”
| River: | Nolichucky |
| Skill: | Intermediate |
| Trip Date: | 05/24/2021 |
When a last-minute work event cancellation freed up my weekend, I quickly scrambled to make some plans to get out to the mountains to paddle. With no rain in the forecast and the Nolichucky slowly dropping, I figured it would be prudent to head there as soon as possible and planned on a Thursday/Friday trip. I’d follow that with a trip out to the Nanty as the weekend temperatures heated up, hoping to give some of the club’s newer paddlers a chance to hone their newfound skills. Though we didn’t get any new boaters out to join us, I was happy to get to paddle with some familiar faces over the extended weekend.
I was joined on the Nolichucky by Rick Steeves and Kathy Cusick. With river levels just above 1100 cfs on Thursday and 1050 on Friday, the Noli was at a nice, chill level for us to shake some of the cobwebs loose from our paddling skills. We enjoyed the technical lines and maneuvering offered by the Noli without its typical push, which was just fine with us. I started feeling like I was getting my stroke timing back after a year of very infrequent paddling. We had a few interesting moments. I proved you can stern squirt a Diesel at Twin Eddies after I blew a rather aggressive ferry attempt. And Rick flirted with a stern squirt on his first run down the crux move at Quarter Mile and then followed it up the next day by boofing the flake rock in that same part of the rapid. But I think we all felt a bit more confident after those two days than we did beforehand.
On Saturday, Kathy and I moved over to the Nantahala and were joined by Garrick and Alyssa Taylor. It had been a while since I had paddled with them, and this trip provided a perfect opportunity to catch up. It had been a few years since we had paddled the Nanty, and though we did notice some changes (we presumed due to the landslides), we played our way down our familiar and favorite spots and cruised through clean lines at the falls. The day was thick with nostalgia, with every rapid and eddy and wave reminding me fondly of happy summer days gone by.
If 2020 taught me anything, it was how easy it is to take so much for granted. A simple, spur-of-the-moment paddling weekend in the mountains was just a normal part of life in the Before Times. Weekends such as this would come and go and barely register any significance after a while. But now? I appreciated every minute of it. It just felt so damn good to get back on the river. And I can’t wait to do it all over again.
