Crabtree Creek (Umstead State Park)

News & Observer
Taking on trees, trash and trepidation
Josh Shaffer - Staff Writer
Published: Wed, Apr. 08, 2009 08:10AM

I've paddled the Haw, the Neuse, the Deep, the Cape Fear and the Eno, but my favorite stretch of water by far runs for five miles down sewage-scented, garbage-strewn, logjam-choked Crabtree Creek.

You won't find a lot of kayaks on the Crabtree.

At one end, there's Cary's wastewater treatment plant, and if the warning signs about PCBs in the fish don't scare you off, the frothy yellow mixture floating on the surface might make you strap your boat back on the Subaru.

Worse, as the creek winds through Raleigh, it's common to find plastic bags and other trash hanging from the tree branches -- leftovers from the latest flood.

But for five miles, Crabtree Creek takes a beautiful spin through William. B. Umstead State Park, a section so untouched and hard-to-reach you'll see more otters than human beings.

For about a year, I'd been wanting to try this piece of the Crabtree. I'd jogged along the greenway from Raleigh Boulevard to Crabtree Valley Mall -- in some of the leafier spots, you can get a idea of what the creek looked like before the city lined it with parking lots.

I'd heard about coyotes along the Umstead banks and more herons, deer and otters than you could count. But I'd also heard about the trees -- fallen trunks thicker than telephone poles that block the creek from bank to bank, stacking up to form 20-foot barriers.

I could imagine trying to drag my canoe up the steep Crabtree banks, slippery as pudding, or getting wedged inside the branches of a toppled sycamore with rapids bubbling around my neck. It didn't sound like a leisurely day, especially after finding this warning from a paddler online:

'The stream is simply choked in MANY places with downed trees and sweeper/strainers galore. You want to see my black eye?'

So it took a while to work up the gumption. My Crabtree ambition stayed dormant until last Thursday, when the weather was miserable and wet, and I was feeling ornery enough to fight a cantankerous creek.

I borrowed a lightweight Dagger kayak from my sportswriter friend Javi and started meditating on Edward Abbey's description of the Utah desert. This line about the Canyonlands country was particularly inspiring: '... the least inhabited, least developed, least improved, least civilized, most arid, most hostile, most lonesome, most grim, bleak, barren, desolate and savage quarter of the state of Utah -- the best part by far.''

The Crabtree run begins off Old Reedy Creek Road, where Cary treats its wastewater and thousands of cars roar past on Interstate 40. There's a quarry on the right bank, so for the first half-mile, you hear the drone of heavy machinery backing up.

At five feet, water in the Crabtree is just high enough to carry a kayak the full five miles without dragging bottom, and low enough to pass safely under most of the massive oaks.

I hit my first barrier after about five minutes on the water, and it wasn't too dramatic. I just swung my leg over the tree trunk, sat on top and pulled the kayak into the clear. In four hours, I repeated this process nine times. Just once, I had to park the boat in foot-deep mud and drag it around a logjam as tall as a movie screen.

It's exhausting on the Crabtree. No lie. You get so wet that your fingertips wrinkle, and so muddy that you'll spend four days fishing grit and sand out of your ears.

But there's nothing like the Crabtree in Raleigh, and not much like it in Wake County. My favorite section on the Neuse runs between Poole and Mial Plantation roads but even there, you'll see plastic cups floating past and the backs of houses showing on the banks.

Through Umstead, the banks are cratered with otter holes. They swim right past your boat, sleek and whiskered. You'll paddle so close to great blue herons that you can see the pupils in their wide eyeballs.

And at five feet, you'll hit two or three sets of Class II rapids, one of them right under the bridge of the Company Mill dam.

In four hours, the only people I saw on Crabtree Creek were crossing that bridge, and they all stopped to look at the little boat bouncing over the rocks, wondering where it had been, and where it was going.

The park ends abruptly at Ebenezer Church Road. As I pulled the boat to shore, I was greeted by large real estate signs announcing the construction of new homes starting at $800,000.

Just then, I noticed the sewage smell again.
josh.shaffer@newsobserver.com