Page 35 - "Mississippi in the 1st Person" - Michael James Stone (Demo/Free)

As I walked on scouting the route I could not help but feel like this
was NOT the Mississippi River I have been misled to believe in, but

a local legend like Paul Bunyon that proportions and sizes were great-
ly exaggerated. And while there was a certain charm to the fall sea-
sonal appeal. IT WAS UGLY AT TIMES IN THE WATER.

The Lake had looked beautiful, but surveying the Creek, I got a bad
case of the UGLIES.

OK, this had gotten serious, I had no water. Oh sure I could remove
a lot of my gear and get the Inflatable Kayaks back to a draft of
maybe two inches, but this was just not right. I could imagine later

finding shallows and stream bed, but this was just an outright creek
and it had so little water I know I couldn’t start like this. The Great

Mississippi River had turned out to be Missy Creek and that was
being nice.

Knowing I was not going to drag my kayaks needlessly down
the Mississippi Creek Bed, I began to use my imagination and

memory of the pictures I had seen when the Creek was higher
and spring rains brought the water level up. That encouraged

me because I had seen A LOT of videos of this area and none of
them showed a Creek this shallow. I know starting in May
would be different, I never anticipated this low of water at the

start.

Taken my time to “scout out” and walkabout my first day

in Minnesota and Lake Itasca I formulated a general plan
of what I would do and how to do it so I decided to head
back to the Cabin for some down time……...as if that was

going to happen