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Dicks Creek & Middle Fork Broad

by William Gatling | Feb 22, 2010 | Canoe & Kayak Trip Reports

Exploration Trip, March 1, 2009

The Middle Fork of the Broad River bubbles up about seven miles ESE of Clarkesville on the south side of the Eastern Continental Divide traced by Georgia Highway 13 at Dicks Hill, which is also the source of Hazel Creek to the east and the North Fork of the Broad to the southeast. For its first ten miles it drains a densely forested natural area almost entirely within the southeastern corner of the Chattahoochee National Forest and the Lake Russell Wildlife Management Area (LRWMA). To the east it drains Davis, Currahee, Farmer, Allen, and Wells mountains before leaving the national forest, entering Banks County and becoming a more pastoral stream.

I have been dreaming of paddling the Middle Fork of the Broad River since the mid-1970’s and often talked about it with the GCA’s first Exploration Chairman, Gary DeBacher. He walked the entire section we paddled in the 1970’s and wrote an exploration trip report for the November, 1976 Eddy Line about a 4 mile section of the river, A to B in Welander’s A Canoeing & Kayaking Guide to Georgia, 40 miles downstream of the headwaters streams we paddled this day.

Our trip was billed in The Eddy Line as a Class 2-4 “Exploration Wildcard,” meaning we would paddle a stream “not yet written up in any guide book” or on the AW website. There is no river gauge anywhere near the LRWMA, but we figured it had rained at least 2 inches there since Friday night, so our intrepid crew (open boaters Kevin McInturff, Liph Johnson and I) set out to paddle the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Broad despite forecasts of heavy rain, strong winds and snow.

Kevin had paddled the Middle Fork a few years a

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