Kayaking the New River.

On the last day of our short vacation to Stony Fork Recreation Area Carole and I took a kayaking trip down the New River. The New River is, ironically, one of the oldest rivers on Earth. It's also unique in that it flows north. Most of the rivers familiar to us flow to the south. But good ol' New River starts in NC, flows through Virginia, and then into West Virginia where it gets a lot more rough and offers some nice whitewater rapids.

We have done a fair amount of kayaking on the New River. And, except for some stretches we've rafted in West Virginia, it's a pretty tame river. We generally have to paddle a lot since there are long stretches of flatwater that don't seem to move much. This trip was pretty much that way, and we encountered only a couple of riffles and a single Class II rapid which was a little fun.

We didn't carry our kayaks with us. Carole and I have been debating on what we want to have in a tandem kayak and so we have been trying out various models. On this trip we used a sit-on-top kayak and we preferred it (slightly) to the traditional kayak style. So we'll likely end up getting one of those.

This is the way we'll probably tend to do the seating. Carole in front, me in back.

We passed several big cliffs like this one.

This was part of a big private estate. The owners had two picnic shelters like this one.

Passing under I-77.

This was taken as we passed Shot Tower State Park. It's an historical park. The shot tower above was used to make lead shot, which was then crafted into bullets. Molten lead would be pour from the top floor into a pool of water at the base where the drops of lead would cool into spheres suitable for transforming into bullets.

Video!