Paddle Georgia Comes Home
River Enthusiasts Converge on Athens

June 15, 2011
Richard Milligan

More of us ought to take advantage of this defining feature of our landscape, and Paddle Georgia promises to help make getting out on the river here in Athens a more accessible possibility.

Participants of Paddle Georgia, an event fashioned after Bike Ride Across Georgia (BRAG), will camp out in towns along the route. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, the group will be staying here with us at Clarke Central High School. Following each day’s stint on the river, shuttles will ferry river-goers to the shopping center at Alps and downtown to enjoy Athens’ restaurants and night life. Be ready to welcome these visitors and to glean from them what they’ve learned about your city by paddling though it.

The trip begins Saturday upstream from Ben Burton park on the Middle Oconee river. By Saturday afternoon, participants will make it to the confluence of the Middle and North Oconee rivers at Whitehall Forest, and from there the flotilla will continue to make its way down out of the piedmont and into the coastal plain to the Journey’s End festival in East Dublin. Along the way, participants will visit historic sites such as Scull Shoals in Greene County, and will gain a sense of the instrumental roles the river plays by touring a hydropower dam, the coal-fired Plant Branch in Milledgeville, the proposed intake site for Plant Washington near Sandersville and the recently opened solar panel manufacturing center in Dublin. Paddlers, who on previous trips have ranged in age from 4 to 74 and often come as family groups, will also benefit from educational programs on the river’s cultural and natural history as well as the opportunity to collect chemical and biological data on the river’s health.

Sold out every year, the event is organized by the Athens-based Georgia River Network (GRN), a nonprofit that works statewide to engage and empower Georgians to protect and restore our rivers. Overwhelmingly popular from its start in 2005, Paddle Georgia has brought more than 1,800 people out for extended river trips and raised more than $85,000 for river protection. Proceeds from this year’s fundraising “canoe-a-thon” will go to watershed groups along the Oconee including the Upper Oconee Watershed Network, Lake Oconee Water Watch, and the Altamaha Riverkeeper’s Oconee River Project.

More than a boon to Athens’ businesses for the weekend and source of funding for the important work that watershed groups do for our community (e.g., watch-dogging officials on the Trail Creek chemical spill), this event brings important attention to an underappreciated amenity here in Athens. Though many of us visit the rivers in town at Ben Burton, the Botanical Gardens or along the Greenway, few of us have had the opportunity to travel through town and across the landscape borne upon the river’s waters. Lots of people head up to the Broad for a short trip, but folks really familiar with the two-headed Oconee’s winding path through town are few and far between. Big Dogs on the River, an outfitter on the Atlanta Highway, is an important step in the direction of getting more Athenians to know our rivers, but the city could do much more to highlight the beauty and importance of the North and Middle Oconee.

As it has with communities along previous journeys on the Chattohoochee, Etowah, Ocmulgee, Flint, Coosawattee, Oostanaula, Broad and Savannah rivers, Paddle Georgia can help Athens better appreciate the Oconee. According to GRN Executive Director April Ingle, when Paddle Georgia comes to town, folks say, “Hey, we have something here in town that we didn’t even realize could draw people into our communities for tourism and recreation.”

Modest improvements such as canoe access points and portage paths could easily transform underused amenities—the rivers—into more salient and enlivened parts of our city. Water trails, routes that facilitate access to the river for paddlers, would “dovetail nicely with the existing Greenway project” says Chris Mangiello, a staff member at GRN.

The Oconee River system provides our drinking water, and it carries away our waste water. Its waters play a critical role in producing the energy for our homes and businesses. For Ingle, one of the most exciting parts of Paddle Georgia is helping people, many of whom are newcomers to canoeing or kayaking, to experience rivers first-hand and to see the state from the perspective of its rivers, an experience that makes the need to protect our watersheds apparent. In the process, she explains, an “awesome little community forms—everyone sort of leaves the world behind and comes together around the shared goal of moving down the river.”

Building this kind of relationship between people and the river is absolutely necessary if we want to protect this essential component of our broader ecological relations. Ben Emanuel, director of Altamaha Riverkeeper’s Oconee River Project, explains the important ties between recreation and conservation: “The idea is the more people actually get to know the river, the more they’ll be interested in protecting it.” Hopefully, witnessing the community-building and consciousness-raising fluvial experience of these paddlers will help us see the opportunities to develop a more central and recognized relationship to the Oconee for our community here in Athens.

Photos of the event