Back on the water, back in time

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com 

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PORTAGE, Wis.

We are back together, back on the water and back in time. 

Paddlers enter the difficult part of the Portage Canal.

Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle 2011 launched here June 5, the successor of our adventure last year called Fox River Heritage Paddle 2010. The intent of both is to get people to experience and appreciate the rivers and to support the effort to have them designated as the Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Parkway by the National Park Service.

The first thing you’ll notice is we’ve added a river to our paddles. In fact, the first canoe and kayak paddle of the season included both the Fox and the Wisconsin. It had a lot of variety overall.

Portage is teaming with history. We were there during Portage Canal Days to honor the crossing between the rivers by Jacques Marquette and Jean Nicolet in 1673. We started on the Fox and finished on the Wisconsin.

We went back in time to several eras, starting with camping the night before at the Surgeon’s Quarters – the one remaining building from Fort Winnebago (1829-45). It is packed with artifacts, from a wardrobe Confederate Commander Jefferson Davis may have helped build, to a slightly creepy surgeon’s table actually used at the fort.

Our launch spot was a wayside across State 33, where we were greeted by a voyageur canoe full of English fur traders. They would play a short but fatal role in a reenactment of a colonial ambush just over a mile down river at the Indian Agency House, built in 1832 and restored a century later.

We had just completed the first of our three portages when the muskets started blazing from the brush and cut down the unawares Brits.

Rather than carrying our gear the nearly two miles to the Wisconsin River, as Marquette and Joliet did, we took the Portage Canal – hand dug 1849-51, improved in 1876 and 1928 and now the subject of a rehab effort. The canal seems under-appreciated in Portage. The view from the water was of a peaceful passage filled with birdsong – most of the way.

For two blocks near the end, the canal narrows to a trickle through a grassy marsh. At times, the best way to propel my kayak was to grab a handful of reed canary grass on both sides and pull myself through. Add in two more portages at Adams Street and a levy at the end, and we were glad to carry our boats several hundred feet to the Wisconsin River.

The Wisconsin is famous for its shifting sandbars, which are available for camping. But this was just a day trip, a warm-up to weekend trips on the big river that include Sauk City to Muscoda this weekend (June 11-12) and Muscoda to Wyalusing State Park on June 25-26.

After a lunch break, we re-launched into the steady flow of the Wisconsin. Two heavy Hobie kayaks – equipped with outriggers, bicycle pedals and sails – that had struggled mightily in the canal now were in their open water element.

A bald eagle made a pass over our group, conveying its blessing on the event.

We had kayaks from little recreational milk jugs of boats to tandems, sit-upons and handmade wooden beauties. We had canoes, stand-up boards and the return of the 28-foot Fox of the River voyageur canoe. Forty-two participants, by my rough count.

Along the way, groupings of boats would shift and, with them, the conversations. With a slight wind in our faces and a good current pushing from behind, the six miles to Dekorra passed too quickly.

We landed at the busy Dekorra boat landing right about on our 3:30 p.m. estimate, having averaged better than 3 mph on the Wisconsin. We stacked up our boats on the Northeast Wisconsin Paddlers club trailer and headed for that post-trip brew that tastes all the better having been earned.