Wassataquoik Stream

With the headwaters of the Wassatiquoik coming from the north side of Katahdin this run is Maine's ultimate wilderness adventure paddle with a 6-mile hike in, and a 22-mile paddle through Baxter State Park and Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. For whitewater, you'll encounter a handful of scoutable class IV rapids, a V+ gorge, and miles and miles of highly scenic class I/II boogie. This best chance for success in catching water on this hard-to-get run is late May to mid-June considering Baxter State Park doesn't open until May 15th and sometimes later with a heavy mud season. This is a large watershed and does come in with healthy rain during the summer months. However, water will quickly drop a day or 2 after a rain event so you need to be on it.

To determine the water level you must look at 3 gauges and do some subtraction. Take USGS East Branch, and subtract the USGS Sebois flow. Then visit the Matagamon Dam Page and also subtract the Matagamon Dam flow and Webster Streamflow. Basically, it's East Branch minus Sebois minus Matagamon Dam minus Webster Stream= Rough amount of water coming from Wassatiquoik. You roughly want to have around 1500 cfs remaining after the correlation for a low-end flow as there are other tributaries that feed into the East Branch Penobscot above the guage in Grindstone.

There are two different locations you can take out. The first takeout you can use is at the Orin Falls trailhead in the Katahdin Woods and Waters Monument. Beware this option is not very obvious from the river and if you miss the little trail sign for the International AT it is likely you'll float by. A short walk from the trailhead up the road will bring you to a bank above the river. This is the best place to get a visual of the river to determine the flow. Not far from here is the I

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