Lazy Beaver 2024 Update
by Jeff Seering
The Lazy Beaver Canoe and Kayak Race may not be so lazy this year when it is held on Sept. 28. While for the past several years, the Baraboo River from LaValle to Reedsburg has been fairly open without the need for paddlers to portage or lift over logs, that probably won’t be the case this year. Weather has not been kind to the Baraboo and other southern Wisconsin rivers this year. An extremely wet spring, accompanied by strong winds, knocked a lot of trees down. Unfortunately many of those trees fell all the way across the Baraboo River. When I paddled from LaValle to Reedsburg in early June, there at least five big jams I had to river ninja my kayak over, under and through, cutting the openings I could with a bow saw and clippers.
Due to a family medical situation and due to high water, I wasn’t able to do any jam clearing in June. However when I went downriver in July, it was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was that some of the jams I saw in June were swept clear by high water. The bad news was that the same high water more than replaced the cleared jams with new jams, some of which were worse. On Saturday, August 24, my son and I went downriver from LaValle to Douglas Landing, the Lake Redstone outlet with the intention of clearing jams. That’s only about a third of the way to Reedsburg. I decided to just work on that section because it has six jams, some of them nasty. We’ll take on from Douglas Landing to Reedsburg Labor Day weekend. There are two jams to clear in that stretch that I know of.
The truth of the matter is I don’t have the equipment to take on really big logs. I haul two 18-inch chainsaws in my canoe along with bow saws and clippers. My son paddles his kayak. I’m 70 and I handle the chainsaw, figuring that I have many less years to live than he does in case of a sawing accident. Cutting up jams is challenging as you deal with both gravity and often river currents. I prefer that I potentially be hurt and not him. He helps with hand cutting and moving floating logs. I ask him to come along mainly for safety reasons. It is never a good idea to use a chainsaw alone, especially in a river.
My chainsaws are too small to handle big trees and are not powerful enough to handle partially submerged logs of any size. It doesn’t help that often the timber that has to be cut has some silt on it which dulls the chainsaw. So after a little more than four hours of work and paddling, there are still three partially submerged logs paddlers will have to lift boats over and one tree to duck under. Of course the river was low on August 24, as low as it was last year. So if the river comes up by the time of the Lazy Beaver, paddlers might be able to float over those logs.
While I am disappointed we weren’t able to completely clear all the jams, the good news is the river areas where the boat lifts may be necessary, are relatively shallow. I was able to stand on the river bottom to get a firm base for chainsaw work. While the Baraboo looks muddy, most of it has a pretty firm sand bottom. Most of the jams also involve some over the water cutting.
I am fairly confident we will be able to cut clear paths through the two jams south of Douglas landing this weekend. So the most challenging part for Lazy Beaver participants this year will likely be the early part of the race.
