The river was up and the water was running fast but 5 of us put on Thursday at Dam 3. The gang included Houston and Gretchen Winbigler, Kelly Sziraky and her son Alex and yours truly. I had never paddled the spring with water this high but Houston and Gretchen talked about past trips were it was high. We stopped at a gravel bar early for lunch since our normal stop, play and eat stop was not showing much gravel when I scouted it late Wed. afternoon. We had a nice lunch and enjoyed the cool water. We were able to stop at the normal lunch spot as the water had gone down a bit but it was still higher than I had ever seen it. We all went left at Saddler Falls. We also decided to take off Thursday at the pavilion area of Spring River Oaks Campground rather than there normal takeout. Again, this decision was made from my scouting on Wed. The water was running fast and if there had been lots of others at the normal takeout, it might have been hard to put in and stop. All in all, we had a good day on the water. Houston and Gretchen had to leave for home after the day. Kelly, Alex and I went to dinner at Wood’s Riverbend Restaurant in Mammoth. We saw lots of turtles on logs and one interesting formation. It was a hugh rock out from the bank, river left, with a big log on top of it. There were branches sprouting from the log. Do checkout the picture of it on the next page.
On Friday, the three of us set out for another adventure on the water. Kelly and Alex packed to go home after the paddle. The river was still up and again, different for me than ever before. We did stop at our usual place for lunch and again took the left side going over Saddler Falls. As for the falls, once I got down them, I looked back and as I saw on Wed., there is a 3’ to 4’ sharp ledge water fall on the far right and then bushes along the ledge toward the middle of the river. I then notice what seemed to be a wide grooved out section of the ledge in the middle of the river. It looked as though you could have run that and then turned left and go down the lower section of Saddler.
We had a few swims but all turned out okay and everyone seemed to enjoy the fast, refreshing cool water of the Spring River.