ON THE SOUTH YADKIN RIVER — It felt good to finally unbend our bodies from the canoe.
We rested the Pathfinder on top of Cooleemee Dam on the Rowan County side.
The huge boulders nearby made good ledges for sitting and ideal places to just lie back and drink in the afternoon sun. Locals have long called the falls and rocky section below the dam The Bullhole, an area where a bull ox once drowned in swirling water flowing rapidly over the shoals.
In the dead of summer, hardly any water falls over the dam. The sound of rushing water I heard was mostly going through the raceway on the Davie County side.
For 100 years or so, this place attracted industry, fishermen, lovers, church baptisms, picnickers and community groups. It also lured beer drinkers, drug users and vandals, until the private property owners on both sides of the shoals had enough.
The Bullhole has been posted and policed for trespassers and left to the infrequent river canoers, who must portage around the dam. Visionaries hope the public will someday enjoy this place again as the “Riverpark at Cooleemee Falls.”
I wish them luck. Previous visitors had painted messages on the rocks where I was sitting, but other signs of human vandalism were gone. Trash was at a minimum.
I sat with our waterproof bags, the paddles and life jackets while Jon, the photographer, went to explore the middle reaches of the dam.
It seemed like a good opportunity to take off my Converse high-tops and shake out the inch or so of river sand that had collected inside. Spying a good rush of river water seeping through the rocks, I walked over to rinse out the sneakers and failed to see the slippery mix of mud and water.
In an instant, I lay flat on my back, looking up at the sky and wondering if I would ever walk again.
Jon had heard the crash and looked back my way.
“I don’t think I hit my head,” I said, still motionless with water running down the back of my T-shirt. “Otherwise, I would be unconscious.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not,” Jon said.
The notion of packing me out of The Bullhole on a stretcher somehow didn’t appeal to him.
I rose to my feet, made a quick inventory for broken bones and pronounced myself a survivor. I put my shoes back on and gathered up some of the stuff to take down to the canoe, which Jon already had carried below the dam.
“Do we have everything?” I asked.
“Everything but your dignity,” Jon said, nodding toward where I had fallen.
Jon and I covered roughly 19 miles on the South Yadkin River, from Foster Road to the Salisbury pump station.
By riding on the river, we straddled the boundary line between Rowan and Davie counties. Except for a couple of fishermen at the pump station, we did not talk to anyone during the whole trip.
In fact, the one person we saw was an older gentleman in red bathing trunks on the other side of the dam at Cooleemee. As we readied to push off a rock below the dam, the man waved and shouted something to us that I interpreted as, “Have a safe trip.”
Still, we saw plenty of evidence of people on our journey. At one point, Jon dubbed our trip the “Parade of Chairs.”
Folks had positioned chairs of all shapes and sizes — one seat was actually a booth from a old diner — beside trees along the river bank or on sandbars reaching out into the river. They made good seats for fishing.
On one sandbar, someone had poked several forked sticks into the soft mud to hold fishing poles. At other spots along the river, fishing lines hung from trees or from jugs in the water.
I sat briefly on the chair of a swing, fashioned with a board and two ropes. Elsewhere, we saw single rope swings hanging over the water. Here and there, someone had built a pier or a treehouse.
In the distance, we could hear cars or even people talking. I thought I heard a saw mill once.
But we didn’t see any fishermen, swimmers or any other canoers, for that matter.
I think I counted only about three or four houses. Otherwise, we bordered pasture and forest, feeling as though we were far removed from civilization and captive of a gentlemanly host, the “South River.”
Our friends became egrets, herons and hawks. A bullfrog croaked out its displeasure when we splashed near its home. Or was it a mating call?
I saw the rear end of a deer speed away on the bank above me. I pointed out a furry critter climbing up another side, but we didn’t know what to call it. A groundhog? A gopher?
Water bugs dance to a frantic song on the South Yadkin. Cicadas provide constant background music.
Moths and butterflies populate the sandbars. Spiders feast in the trees, where their webs resemble cotton candy.
We saw several big fish splash out of the water near us. Turtles also plopped off fallen limbs and into the water whenever we approached.
n n n
Just as the South Yadkin River meanders to and fro, creating this crooked corridor of life between the two counties, canoers have to paddle from side to side, looking for deep water.
Drought and sediment combine for a canoe trip that sometimes is as much poling through the water as it is paddling.
Particularly between Foster and Powell roads, Jon and I often climbed out of the canoe to pull it through the shallow water or lift it over fallen trees.
In places, the trees built a natural bridge across the water. Elsewhere, I told Jon, they made the river seem prehistoric the way they poked out of the water like petrified wood.
Jon said they looked more like shipwrecks — a better description, I thought.
To describe the South Yadkin as a lazy river these days would be an understatement. We could have paddled as easily upstream as downstream. We ate our lunch in the canoe not far from the railroad bridge before one reaches Cooleemee, and we hardly moved.
It was if we had thrown down an anchor, the water was that still.
n n n
I had made an earlier, much more difficult trip on the South Yadkin River in 1992, when another photographer and I started near Turnersburg and ended up at Foster Road.
Then, we struggled mightily against the fallen debris and shallow water in our flat-bottom boat, grossly miscalculating the time it would take to reach Rowan County. Beaten, we pulled the boat out at Foster Road well after dark, and I wanted nothing to so with the South Yadkin for quite awhile.
The river begins in Alexander County near Hiddenite, where Greasy and Wallace creeks come together. It covers about 64.5 miles before joining the Yadkin River at The Point, where Rowan, Davie and Davidson counties come together.
Its tributaries include Rocky, Second, Third, Fourth and Hunting creeks and Five-Mile and Beaverdam branches.
The South Yadkin River snakes under major highways such as Interstate 40, U.S. 64, N.C. 801 and U.S. 601.
Schools, churches and roads have been named for it. The industrious built mills, power plants, boathouses, and bathhouses along its banks. People have been baptized in its waters and attended harvest moon picnics along its banks.
Ferries used to take people across the river instead of bridges. Davie County’s first Masonic Picnic, still a big event today — was held at the Cooleemee falls and shoals.
Settlements have been along the South Yadkin for close to 250 years.
Still, it seemed deserted to Jon and I, but we were weren’t complaining.
n n n
Like it’s big daddy, the Yadkin River, the “Little Yadkin” is a muddy mess.
If the Crayola crayon people ever wanted a palette for all of their shades of brown, they could just sit along the banks of the South Yadkin River and take a sampling.
The river is like brown gravy thanks to what environmentalists call nonpoint source pollution — the runoff from farming operations, urban development and simple erosion.
The tributaries that feed the South Yadkin contribute as much to the sediment as what occurs along the river itself.
In the late 1990s, the South Yadkin River sub-basin had 87 registered animal operations, twice as many as in any of the other 16 Yadkin-Pee Dee River sub-basins. Most of them were dairy operations.
The state’s Basinwide Management Plan reported in December 1997 that the levels of erosion for the South Yadkin sub-basin were the highest in the entire Yadkin basin.
While the state judged water quality to be excellent in the upper part of the sub-basin, including Hunting Creek and North Hunting Creek, the lower reaches showed elevated levels of turbidity, iron, manganese, copper and fecal coliform.
Bad stuff.
The South Yadkin River and its tributaries have more than 30 permitted dischargers, with the two largest being the Statesville wastewater treatment plants on Third and Fourth creeks. Other dischargers include the Cleveland, Mocksville and Cooleemee wastewater treatment plants, Tyson Foods, KoSa and Southern States Fertilizer.
Of 694.7 miles of surface water in the South Yadkin sub-basin, the state considers 486 miles as “support-threatened” and 17 miles as “partially supporting.”
The “support-threatened” category means the river or creek fully supports its uses now, but may not in the future unless pollution prevention measures are taken. It also means that water quality conditions are worse than they were in the past.
“Partially supporting” means the surface water is impaired and in danger.
Just pushing our way along the bottom of the river or stepping into knee-deep mud persuaded Jon and I that the South Yadkin is choking from all of its sediment.
We wondered if it ran deeper, wider and cleaner a hundred years ago. I asked myself what might be left of the river a hundred years from now.
n n n
Jason Walser, executive director of the LandTrust for Central North Carolina, said it only required a 35-minute plane ride for him to realize the importance of preserving “a magnificently undeveloped corridor.”
From the air, he said, it’s plain that the Yadkin and South Yadkin rivers — basically, from the U.S. 29 bridge to U.S. 64 and beyond — represent the region’s “last great oasis.”
I talked to Walser the day after our river trip.
He described the two rivers as forming the only wildlife river corridor still connecting the mountains to the coast.
The same lack of development Jon and I had seen on the South Yadkin exists in large part along the Yadkin for some 20 miles, Walser said.
The land trust got a foothold in preserving the South Yadkin corridor when it purchased 300 acres at the confluence with Second Creek and donated the property to Catawba College for a wildlife refuge.
The purchase encompasses 1.5 miles of shoreline at this big bend in the river and includes — as does the whole South Yadkin River corridor — important ecosystems identified in Dr. Mike Baranski’s Natural Areas Inventory of Rowan County.
The land trust hopes this purchase serves as a catalyst for improving water quality, preserving wildlife habitat and leading to more land acquisition, easements or buffers along the South Yadkin.
For now, land prices are still affordable, city water-sewer utilities lie far enough away to discourage development and major highway proposals are not a threat.
In addition, a handful of landowners control significant tracts of property along both rivers. Five landowners each have in excess of 1,000 acres. A dozen more own at least 300 acres each.
Walser said there’s a small window of opportunity to preserve the land before development pressures are too much.
“We think our time line is 10 to 15 years before it’s not worth saving,” Walser said.
He envisions how preserved corridors could connect important recreational areas such as the proposed Riverpark in Cooleemee, Boone’s Cave, the wildlife refuge and Wil-Cox Bridge at U.S. 29.
Preservation also could protect bald eagle habitats and the natural areas identified by Baranski, besides providing places to hunt and fish and escape civilization, Walser said.
Walser acknowledges that after the plane trip he and other land trust members wondered why they hadn’t spent more time protecting the river corridors.
n n n
The river brings out the music in some people.
I whistled as we paddled through the day. Jon sang “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
We came upon things that fascinated us, such as a huge hornets’ nest that hung over the water like a piñata ripe for the breaking. We decided to pass.
We also saw things that puzzled us. A pipe on the Rowan County side of the river near the Cooleemee dam discharged a pink water that created a lot of suds and discolored the river for a brief spell. We figured it was the Cooleemee wastewater treatment plant.
A white bull along the river gave us a grunt.
At Foster Road, we investigated a handsome stream gauging station of the U.S. Geological Survey. The slender structure made out of fieldstone records the river’s water level and rate of flow — information used in things such as flood forecasts, reservoir operations, bridge designs and the like.
We only turned our canoe over once. Again, I was the clumsy one.
Sitting up front, I committed the sin of throwing my leg over the canoe’s side and tried to push us over a limb that was holding us back. My foot slipped as I pushed, causing the canoe to tip sideways and throw us both into the water.
My waterproof bag floated slowly away as we secured the other things and dumped the excess water out of the canoe.
The bag eventually stopped downstream against some other debris in the water. As we floated by, I retrieved it — and my dignity.
n n n
In September: a walk through Spencer.
Today's News
