Paddling the Buffalo National River in Arkansas (from Ponca to Pruitt to Hasty Overnight)

Currently getting ready to launch at the Ponca River Access. As you can see there, it's flowing pretty good. I talked with the rangers at the BOC and they said that they think there's a clog back there that's causing the water to go over. Because if you're used to, if you know this area, you know that's a lot of water for the Buffalo River relatively for paddling. Here's the rig though. I got five gallons of water up at the very front to try to, since it's just me paddling, put a lot of weight in the front so I'll be in the back there. So all my gear is kind of bunched up there. Should be about 100 pounds or so. But yeah, looking forward to a good flow. We just got two inches of rain last night after like 25 inches of rain last weekend. So the river was up and just got a little refreshed. This creek has started to get a lot of debris from that two inches we just got this morning like at an hour. So two weeks ago I actually walked this section right here on the riverbed. I actually posted a video of that so you should go watch that because that was only two weeks ago. It's just crazy that I'm floating it now. This is an area here they warned me about. The flooding kind of drove three channels down this area. One over there, one here, one there. Said we'd have to probably portage this because it's too shallow at three channels. All because of that flood. Back there is Braden and I's campsite from two weekends ago. Kind of crazy. Came out to scout this rapid down here. It's kind of fun. Might as well. Some of the channels right now have been widened by the flood. So the lines aren't always as deep as high the water got. When you look at these trees you see all the leaves up in them. They're flushed down. Here's the area where Braden and I camped two weekends ago. I was walking across this with dry feet. That creek on the right over there was not flowing at all. I actually caught a fish just downstream. Here's our campsite from two weekends ago. So this was our fire pit. And then if you look up in the trees here you can see how the leaves that were in the water current got stuck on the trees and the branches. All the way up, up in here, up to there. So this whole area was just underwater which is insane. I really can't even imagine it. This creek was not flowing at all. Obviously no creeks were. This is the area we walked across underwater. It's just amazing. Something crazy. Closest I've come to flipping veneers is probably right here. Just trying to get around that tree in the middle of the frame on what would be river right, the left side of this frame. And I cut in a little bit too much. Front got caught on that rock bar right there and then it swung around on the back end stuck on that tree. So I was pinned down and slipped. The following are a couple of clips I took by tucking my phone into my PFD of the Buffalo River's most notorious chain of rapids, Hell's Half Acre. This extended rapid chain is known for its sharp turns, boulder-filled channels, and strong currents that often challenge paddlers. Here we go. Innumerable paddlers have flipped their boats here, especially at higher water levels when the waves really get chunky. These boats certainly don't slide very well. Plastic's much better for that but not too bad. This rock on river left here is especially notorious for wrapping boats around it, often leaving paddlers stranded with no boat to finish off the paddle trip on Kyle's Landing. This next rapid here is the last one before Kyle's Landing I believe and three years ago my dad and I canoed from Ponca to here and we were planning on stopping at Kyle's. Hadn't flipped once. Area was under a flash flood so the water was huge. We flipped on this last rapid, lost all our gear. My dad actually lost his wedding ring and we've never, never gone on another paddling trip since with him. I think that was the deal breaker here. He described watching me float downstream outside the canoe, just swim in. It was a very terrifying moment for him and we lost all our gear. It was a little bit of a financial barrier between coming on another float trip because you know we were pretty inexperienced so we didn't have any maps. We didn't even know the time of day most times. That was back in sixth grade for me so it's fun to be back here though. This is a great example here of one of the hardest aspects of the Buffalo River. Usually the water, the rapid itself is fairly reasonable but there's trees everywhere and especially after a flood they'll fall in. I mean this is one obstacle to avoid. You don't want to hit that branch, get caught up on it. But then you got this one and then all the water is going through that tree, the fastest current. So it's just hard to avoid these things. I might kind of portage around the side here. Here's the main bathroom at Ponca. You can see right there is the water debris line. The river's all the way down. Since my departure earlier in the morning the Buffalo River had already risen from 460 cfs to 625 cfs with more coming thanks to the morning's rain. After Kyle's landing this meant the began to get noticeably more large as the gauges gosh. I guess it was this tree here that closed it off completely. But I mean I probably could have made it through there it's just not really. I mean maybe it is worth it pointed out a specific strainer that was covering up the main channel of the river right before Kyle's landing and I portaged across it. Then when I was at Kyle's landing I met a couple guys on kayaks that had actually flipped there because they tried to run it. Got caught up on a branch, flipped, and then one of them actually went under the log in the river, went under it briefly, and fortunately came back up. But that's how a lot of people die on this river is getting caught in those strainers so they ended their trip early just because they didn't want to deal with this big hole. Yeah. After paddling almost continuously all day I decided to pitch camp for the night around 4 30. At this point the river had risen to 660 cfs at Pruitt and likely more upstream where I was. Though camping on a rock bar isn't really ideal, I did manage to find a small spot that was relatively flat and dry and not too rocky. For dinner I cooked up some Mexican smoky chipotle, put it on a tortilla. Looks really good to me. The bags are like a couple bucks at Walmart for these. The good bean is what it's called and you just boil the bag in water and that cooks it. I really love that kind of stuff for trips like this and it's so much cheaper than Mountain House or any of that bull crap. It's just expensive. I do this thing when I don't have cell service where I stack a couple rocks at the edge of the water line just to see if it's risen or dropped in the morning. I just stacked these like 30 minutes ago or maybe a little more at the very edge of the water line so like that would be now about here. The river is rising which I didn't think it would be doing right now. That's interesting. This is my messy room for the night. It's about 16 minutes till sunrise. Just finished packing up the boat, taking down camp and yeah it's a pretty foggy morning. If it wasn't so foggy I'd probably leave right now but I think I'm gonna wait for just a little bit more light so I can see what's going on down river a little more. After peaking around midnight at nearly 1,000 cfs the river began its gradual decline to about 880 cfs by the early morning when I departed. Pretty eerie. I can hear the rapid coming up but I can't really see. I just hear it and I see that little island. It looks wider to the right. Another blind rapid coming up. Usually I like to plan my rapids and like one what's right in front of me, two what's just ahead and three what's coming up but three is definitely out of question and two it's just barely visible. Here's the Pruitt bridge where the highway comes across. I guess the takeout in Pruitt is just down river. Here's Pruitt takeout parking lot. The road down to the river is actually pretty bad shape. My original plan was to have them, Buffalo Outdoor Center, have them pick me up at Pruitt which I just passed but I called them and asked them to take it to Hastie instead which is one advantage of not self-shuttling. It's about a $97 shuttle total so not bad but not great either. I mean if you can self-shuttle it's probably better. I put up some extra rocks to help prevent what happened earlier and help the boat punch through waves a little more rather than just get flown up on top of them. I guess I drank a lot of water so I probably lost a lot of weight as far as the boat goes. I'm starting to wonder if the sun would come out today but it definitely did. It's warming up quick. Burn off that fog and I can actually see the river now. River valley is really opened up now. It's fairly expansive views. I mean there's nothing like this and like above Kyle's I'd say. After Kyle's it started to open but not quite. Still some good rapids. Some pretty wavy rapids too but now it's much more open. Very open valley and I would say it's kind of reminiscent of the current river at this water level. Super chill rapids. Nothing to really go wrong. I also just passed Confluence. Little Buffalo which added a ton of water it looks like. I mean Little Buffalo looks like a very floatable river from at least it's Confluence. I'm sure there's a lot of strainers with a narrow river channel but yeah off looking to floating.