We had a great, albeit wet, weekend on the Cadron. We had 9 paddlers in the group. All of the paddlers came in on Friday night and stayed at Pinnacle Springs Campground (where we were taking out Saturday), Woolly Hollow State Park, or a nearby hotel. The weather was a little chilly, but Kelly Sziraky and her sister, Linda Duck, built a wonderful campfire and we sat around talking and eating smores. We were all a bit concerned about the weather due to the prediction of rain for most of the weekend.
Everyone met at Pinnacle Springs at 8:30 Saturday morning and hung out at the pavilion hoping that the rain, which had been off-and-on all night, would move through by 9:30 or so, as the radar predicted. It looked as though it was going to clear off so we all headed to the put-in at Hwy 124. Unfortunately, not long after we got on the water the rain started once again. Luckily, we were all prepared for the wet and somewhat chilly conditions, so we all decided to make the best of it and enjoy the beautiful scenery despite the wet conditions.
Fortunately, the rain did stop and it ended up being a nice day. The water level was on the low side – just below 2.5’ – so some of the rapids that might otherwise have been a bit tricky, were relatively tame. There were a few spots with some standing waves and a couple of sharp turns, but I’m happy to report that there were no swimmers on this trip and the only “getting wet” was due to the rain! We stopped in a pretty little spot where there were some nice riffles in the water and had lunch and then tried to pick up our pace a little in the afternoon since we were doing approximately 13 miles and had gotten a late start due to the weather.
We made it back to Pinnacle Springs around 4:30 p.m. A few of us camped there another night and enjoyed fajitas and brownies for dinner. Due to the fact that they were predicting some bad storms for Sunday we decided to forego paddling and headed back to Memphis Sunday morning before the weather turned ugly. We all agreed that we would like to do another paddle on Cadron Creek soon – hopefully on a day when the weather is sunny is warm!