Alt Activities

The rain last week put a damper on riding, to say the least, with over 1.5" inches of rain per day for three days running. Remarkable for July-August in Arkansas and a great set-up for Friday afternoon on the Cossatot River with Diane. The Cossatot State Park is in western Arkansas and was in the path of most of the rain. The Ozarks creeks were not so favored, so favorites like the Piney, Richland, etc. were not an option. The Cossatot features some pretty difficult whitewater and has some great play spots for kayakers who are so inclined. I am. Diane shot this little video of me ferrying to an ender spot. That's where you can use a wave, hole or eddy line to sink an end of your boat so that you can go vertical. The best play spots have eddies like the smooth water in the foreground that allow you to recover and easily get back upstream.

Fun stuff. The centerpiece of the park and the river is Cossatot Falls. It consists of six named drops over about a quarter mile. I took the video below from my boat while parked in the middle of Whiplash rapid as Diane and friend Rick run the rapid and my nonrelated brother, Dale Barton, expertly slips his canoe into my eddy. Diane is in blue and she is smooth in the boat! Whiplash is in the middle of the Falls and just below the most difficult drops.

New Media!

I'll try not to get too carried away with the video, but I got a new little Olympus waterproof pocket camera and I'm enamoured with it. The video quality less than topnotch, but coming as an afterthought from a point and shoot camera, I guess I'm impressed! Being waterproof, shockproof,very compact and pretty cheap makes it my kind of toy. What really amazed me was that I could buy a 16gb card that will hold about 16,000 photos at 5 megapixels. Call me a geezer, but that's a hell of a lot of memory for something that costs 50 bucks and is the size of a fingernail.

Hope you enjoyed the whitewater diversion. I know you didn't enjoy it as much as we did! We're fortunate to have some rivers and creeks that are real jewels and time in the boat is a very good thing, especially in August in Arkansas. I should have gone back for more, but it was back to the bike on Sunday for me! I had a mission.