Back to the Great Swamp

I coax M to go with me to the Great Swamp.  I guarantee that it does not take much convincing.  

The high will be 60F today with a chance of showers, although we should be off the water well before the rain arrives.  The sky is overcast and there is a light East wind.  The water level is a somewhat higher than normal, especially for this time of year, but the flow is all within the banks.

We have a nice talk with a couple women that have come down to the put-in, which is at the end of a quarter mile dead end dirt road.  One of them fills me in on the history of the quarry that you pass by on the way in, and also on a cabin that once was on Pine Island - built by a few WWII veterans that used it as their own art center.

We try our luck upstream, crossing one beaver dam and not getting much more than a quarter mile before coming up against a log jam that I didn't want to mess with.  That is a normal occurrence when paddling upstream of the start.  Sometimes it's a go, sometimes it ain't.  We turn around and head downriver.

Autumn is already here and the trees are going orange and red and the cattails have busted open, 

The upper section of the river is tight and twisty, but it mostly away from any trees that can fall and block the route. That is why we started at this upper put-in. Having not been in the marsh since May, I wanted to check out the conditions without dealing with downed trees that are more common in the lower half of this section.  

We  cross three low beaver dams on the way and continue down to the mid-point.  For a few years, there has been some downed trees to deal with near the halfway point and I wanted to check on the status. The tree tangle above the bridge has pretty much disappeared and the blocking log below the bridge has sunk below the surface.  The big jam farther down which has to be portaged is still there.  Someone has been cutting on it, but it will take a lot more cutting to finish the job.  With that, we head back.

Our bird count is a few Wood Ducks, a couple Great Blue Herons, a Hawk and a flock of Blue Jays.  It's not much, but this is the quiet time when birds from the North haven' arrived and the summer birds have headed South, at least that is the way I figure it.