Float Trip After a FLOOD | 4 Days River Camping the Pomme De Terre

Bags packed, boats rigged, meals prepped, and there we were the morning of the trip with no river to float. But yeah, this would be a terrible idea, especially post-flood condition. A single day of rain might have ruined a trip planned for months. Three days before we were supposed to set out on the Miramec, every river we'd considered in our plans had become a torrent. We tracked water data tables and social media posts about the rivers in the least affected regions and made calls to outfitters on rivers we thought might have a chance to still be runnable. With hopes of a trip waning, we had our eye on one river. A river that's always held a special place in our hearts. it would be good um floating on the river side but again it's still the water temperature they're still really cold and so um definitely recommend wearing a life jacket. Awesome. Appreciate you Chelsea. Uh-huh, thank you. Bye-bye. All right, we have a new day. Got down into the low 30s, upper 20s last night. A nice thin layer of frost on everything this morning. I'm gonna see about breakfast. Got us a nice fire stoked and we're gonna head out and we're gonna do the whole lower palmy. The Palmditaire River is the first river we ever paddled. First place I ever went river camping. In 2016 when we got our first kayaks. It's the first place we went. I hear we're in focus now. Suspense. Hey, that's okay. We tried two different rivers and because of some recent rains they're flooded. This is plan C and even though the palmy isn't spectacular, it's not spring-fed, the water's kind of muddy, there's no bluffs or anything particularly scenic about it. Fishing's good. It's kind of like coming home and what's really cool about that is Henry has never been on the palmy with us and we've planned two trips to the palmy with Henry and the ironic thing was there wasn't enough rain either time and now the rain has forced us to bring Henry to the palmy. The cold has got us off to a late start. We got on the water at about one o'clock. We took our sweet time this morning getting out of bed, had a big fire, big breakfast. The palmy. Man, this place brings back a lot of memories. This is my seat gonna make it. Okay. All right, it is 4 29. We're just passing Hermitage and we need to find a spot to camp and with our setup it takes a little while to get going so the clock is ticking on finding camp and we've only seen like one or two suitable campsites this entire time so wanting to avoid obviously trespassing on private property. We're going to look for an island. 30 minutes. Ready, break. I don't know how that's going to go with the dog but it's a lot slower than it looks and when you get around the corner from the first root ball there's a really hard left to avoid a limb in the ground. I just went really slow and backpedaled. I noticed something weird in the water. Solea's PFT is floating away. What is that? Yeah, I got your paddle too. Okay. Yeah, got it. Sir? See, there's not as much orange as I thought there was but it looked like it was it was enough. It was enough. It was good, yeah. Yeah, madam. She's no spring-fed Ozark majesty. She'll never attract scores of day trippers or end up shared in a viral social media post but the palmy really is majestic in her own right. Remembering our first days as kayakers, remembering how something as plain and charming as a backyard stream like the palmy could have awoken such excitement and yearning to explore has rekindled my adventurous spirit to find beauty in the everyday things and she would show us her spirit one more time before bidding us a farewell shove into Truman Lake where this adventure would soon end. Though it's right in our backyard, I'm sure we won't return too often to the Pomme de Terre River. We might be off exploring a renowned Ozark waterway but when we do come back it will always feel like home.