Hiwassee

Finally got on this one Saturday May 17, 2003. According to the TVA page the damn was spilling over 5000 cfs. This made for some fun whitewater. We made the mistake of putting in at the TN 68 picnic area. This lead to three miles of ducking thru and under branches vines, surfing off rootball pillows, and finding the occasional dead end of trees. Its was kinda neat for a bit, then got really old going thru all of the trees. Next time I'm using the Turtletown put-in.

Finally we came to the first drop. A riverwide falls of sorts. Its not really a vertical falls, but a really wide broken ledge with a number of routes, and a couple of strong holes to be avoided. This was best scouted from the center rocks. We ran the right of center lines. There was a cool boof on the bottom right. There was also a hero line on the left thru a solid hole.

Below this was a solid class three wavetrain with a few hidden holes. Then a cool rapid with a big hole at the top, a narrow channel at the bottom, and moving van sized boulder in midstream. From above it was scary looking, and with a bit more water would turn into a massive riverwide hole. After this things calmed down for a bit. Lots of class 2+ boogie water, kind of like the upper ocoee above the olympic course. Then we came to the quarter mile of rapids that was full of the boiling, percolating water...very cool stuff. Textbook Neeley style funny water that tried to squirt my tornado a few times. After this was a long wave train on the right with a lot of good surfing.

The last big rapid is marked by an island mid stream. The hero line is on the right, but one in our group spent some time in an undercut on that side. The right line was still a strong class 3/4 reminicent of double Z on the new.

All in all a cool run, with some of the best big water rapids in the SE this side of west virginia. Most of the ten big rapids are better than anything found on the ocoee.