Major Drop Drops In

 July 24, 2024

Hello fellow voyageurs.

This is Major Drop reporting.  I have returned from a lovely voyage on the Elkhorn and Platte Rivers and a possible unconfirmed side excursion into Xenoica!  I went with my friend Todd and his son and one of Ben’s sons:  3 single-person kayaks and our 2-person and gear inflatable kayak.  The trip we initially planned was West Center Road down to Linoma Beach, as outlined here.  Unfortunately, there is no longer any public access at West Center (don’t worry, I intend to inform paddling.com about this situation so others can hopefully have an easier time planning their trips).  So, we had to improvise.  Although I am not at liberty to disclose the exact locations, we enlisted the aid of some professional/personal contacts and were able to get a last-minute route, pretty similar to the one we read about, dialed in.

Although I was initially hoping for a Sunday trip, I am so glad that it turned out that Saturday was better for others in our group - I needed a day to unpack, clean and stow gear, and recover!  The forecast for Saturday wasn’t great on Friday, but we figured what the hell.  Here are a few things we experienced:

• The weather turned out to be fantastic! 
  

  
  
  
• The rivers were a bit higher than I’d experienced previously.  This was nice because it is kind of a pain to get out of our inflatable kayak when it got stuck on a sand bar and pull it along and then climb back in and repeat, as needed.  Also, Snot Jr. isn’t getting any lighter and sometimes I’d be trying to pull with him in the kayak because he got pretty tired in the latter part of the journey.  But anyway, as I was saying, the water was higher than what I was used to.  Snot Jr. didn’t really want to be in the boat, so he floated along, sometimes being towed by the kayak and other times floating freely in the current.  Initially he offered to be a tug boat and pull each of the kayaks into the river.  However, once our kayak was out there, we just grabbed onto the back of our kayak, Floaty, and kind of floated/walked/ran along behind.  During the parts where it was shallow enough to walk he would sometimes provide commentary about the depth of the water, which was sometimes kind of handy.  He’d say things like, “Major drop” or “Oooo, look out!  Getting pretty shallow!”  At one time he decided he’d only provide updates when requested.  Although he didn’t go along with my request when I asked for auto-updates every 2 minutes or so, he eventually agreed to provide updates if depth changed by more than 6-inches.  For a while I was calling myself “Major Drop” and Snot Jr. “Corporal Current.”  
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• We went through some faster parts of the river that we dubbed “Nebraska rapids”, surviving solely by our wits and reflexes.  Although photos would be underwhelming, I did not have time to snap any because I was too busy “reading the river” in my not-very-fluent riverese.  For a while I was also calling Snot Jr. “Muskrat Lad” because I thought we looked kind of like a playful muskrat frolicking along in the water.  
• I may have been inspired to provide the “Muskrat Lad” nickname because we saw so much wildlife out on the river.  I think it was due to the cooler weather and the earlier forecasted rain/storms, but the animals seemed to appreciate the cooler, cloudy weather and we didn’t see another boat outside of our group during the entire, approximately 11-mile trip!  It was amazingly tranquil and beautiful out there!  Here is a list of some of the animals/animal parts we saw:
• deer
• raccoons (an endearing group of 3 youngsters playing/scampering around on the shore)
• bald eagles (there were many of them).  
  
  
  
• softshell turtle (snout and eyes only)
• fish (lots of jumpers!  One time a couple of us seemed to corner them and there were dozens, possibly even a hundred of them thrashing about above the water and even landing up on the sandy shore!
• great blue heron
• duck decoys (?) (they looked so realistic!  The only reason I eventually concluded they were decoys was because they did not move at all.  Even then, at first I thought they might just be stoic ducks.)
• a bovine vertebrae, weathered to a lovely brown color, as shown here
  
  
  
• some type of creature that sent up a single dark gray or black stalk, very much like a periscope, that quickly retracted back under the water when it sensed our presence.  Todd had initially mentioned something with long eye stalks that I speculated might be a very rare (possibly mythical) creature known as a giant freshwater crab (distant cousin to the fighting land crabs, mascot of the University of American Samoa made famous by Jimmy McGill of Better Call Saul).  For a while I thought we might have traveled through a worm-hole of some type into a place called Xenoica.  However, I didn’t encounter enough evidence on this trip to be able to support this temporary hunch.
• On one large sandbar I decided it would possibly make a pretty good place to live (or at least a few days worth of camping), so I boldly proclaimed, “I claim this island for the Muskrat Kings!”  to which one of my traveling companions on the other side of the bar responded “Booga Booga!” and did some type of dance to which I responded with a similar ancestral dance.

This voyage felt adventurous and important.  The interaction with nature was somehow soothing and inspiring.  It felt like a much-needed balance to the usual day-to-day human-crafted world that I live in most days.  It was also kind of physically tiring.  I came to the conclusion that it is time for Floaty to retire.  Floaty has been great!  She's been a stalwart companion to Snot Jr. and I for 7 years and I will always cherish the time we had with her.  

However, her structural integrity ain't what it used to be and neither Snot Jr. nor I am getting any lighter.  Therefore, the next time we head out to the river I will either be taking my inflatable SUP (it’s big enough that Snot Jr. could latch onto it and float along, if needed) or else the SUP and a regular kayak for Snot Jr. (I feel like he might not dislike paddling as much if he had a lighter, faster, more maneuverable boat.  This is kind of like people that buy cheap bikes that don’t have good parts.  It’s not surprising that they don’t like to bike when the bike that they’ve got makes bicycling a chore, with parts not doing what they should!).

Well, I’ll be sure to get back to the river soon and back to my bicycle even sooner.  Let me know if you get a chance and we’ll try to meet up and catch up.

Bon voyage, mon frer!

BSO