Chilhowee Lake Low Water Paddle || 10-4-08

Saturday Sam and I made the trek up to Chilhowee lake to check out the low water. The water level has been brought down 29 feet to facilitate work on the dam this fall/winter. This is the first time water has been this low in 51 years. Woo doggie!
We put in at the ramp with the nasty bathrooms (yes, this is a recognized landmark). Ramp is kind of a misnomer in this case, as the water is down so low that from the end of the ramp it's still about100 yards to the water's edge. Once on the lake, it's kind of eerie because for the first 100 feet or so, you're only in about 6 inches of water and you can see the cracked lakebed just barely below the surface. Coupled with the mottled reflection of the sun on the water, this made for quite a surreal sight.
In the open water, we putzed around an old stone wall and slalomed through an old fence row whose base was only about 6 inches below the surface. We found many old steel cans embedded in the floor of the lake. Whether from the lack of sunshine or some other variable, the cans were in stellar shape with little rust or fading. Very neat. We're not sure of the exact critter, but the cans were covered in very small leech looking organisms that were about a third of an inch long.
From there, we cut over to where Abrams Creek empties into the lake. This is one of the highlights, as the old highway bridge is completely uncovered now, as are the trestles to the old railroad. After passing under the bridge, we paddled up Abrams Creek as far as we could go. With the water down, it looked how I would imagine run off from a strip mine would look. The water was way down, yes, but there was also a huge swath cut down through the silt and sediment layers. On Abrams Creek we stalked a beaver who would stay kind of close to us, follow us around, then smack it's tail at us to show us who's boss, then dive out of sight for a few minutes. He repeated this routine about 3 times. We also saw a recently hatched fence lizard. Very small, very young. To give an idea of scale, adults are much much bigger than blue tail skinks and a little bigger than green anoles, and the one we saw was MAYBE two, two and a half inches long, including the tail.
After coming back out onto the main channel, we paddled over to the old road bed, hopped out of the kayaks, and went to explore the bridge. It was a very apocalyptic scene, with car parts and beer bottles littering the area. Before the bridge was the back half of an old jeep, complete with roll bar. On the bridge was the bed of an old pickup and the dash and front floorboard of another vehicle (possibly the same truck). The most striking part was the freshwater mussel graveyard. With the recession of the water, the mussels had nowhere to go. The smell on the lake was horrid once the heat of the day hit--the rancid smell of rotting oyster. Hundreds of thousands of these littered the shore, the rocks, the bridge. Walking across the bridge all you could hear was a chorus of broken shells, bearing witness to the freshwater holocaust. Shells ranged in size from a quarter of an inch wide to three inces wide. It kind of brought to mind Star Wars, when the Death Star blows up Alderan and Obi Won Kenobe says there's been a great disturbance in the force, millions of voices crying out in pain and then being instantly silenced.... Man... I must be a dork if I'm making this a Star Wars reference...
Anyway, back in the boats and back to shore. Well, if not shore, mud field. I had to traipse through about a hundred feet of mid-calf depth mud to drag the kayak back to terra firma. Water was maybe 4 inches deep for the last hundred feet, so there was no way to float myself back in any closer.
All in all, very nice use of a Saturday morning.
P.S.--if you're one of my students, ignore the pictures with the beer cans. To prove how little of a life I have, I think it's funny to pretend I'm drinking out of 30+ year old beer cans in the middle of a lake :)