Great trip on the Middle For of LBC!
 

I have to echo Stan's assessment of a great trip on the hard-to-catch section of the Middle Fork from Teegarden to Lisbon. It's a very pretty run. High point for me was the heron rookery about half way on river right. Herons were actively coming and going. Lots of wildflowers, too. Also had a glimpse of a bald eagle.

There were a couple carnage incidents–one less than a minute into the trip and another about five minutes later. The current is fairly swift for a good part of the run with a number of class I and a few low class II rapids. We never had to carry around a downed tree, but there was one we kind of slid over and another we had to walk through some low water or scrape bottom to get around.

One interesting angle was the shuttle. We never set shuttle before getting on the water. The trip leader just pulled out his phone once we reached Lisbon and called a fellow who is associated with the county park district who showed up a few minutes later and took us back to our cars at the put in. Just like calling a cab without the fare!

About the only downside was that the trip ended too soon on such a beautiful day.

Beaver Creek Teagarden
 

Follow JP's link to Columbiana Park facebook. Someone posted pics already.

Entertaining, Ken? Really? LOL :D

Glad to hear a couple of you made it down yesterday. Wish I could have been there! Here is a little more "entertainment" for ya'll. More LOL. (No hard feelings, Ken.)

Last summer after the break healed I was able to get back in my boat, but had to start with 15 minutes at a time. By the time I had built up to about of an hour and a half on lakes I still didn't have enough range of motion to even consider a river. Still had lots of pain in one spot and when a cortisone shot didn't help in September I ended up having another surgery in late October. Fast forward to today and I am still in therapy in a desperate attempt to regain my range of motion and muscle strength.

Unfortunately, early last autumn my cats got flees and I spent 6 weeks vacuuming top to bottom every 3 days, finally stopping the day before my surgery. This gave me tennis elbow in BOTH elbows, which showed up right after the surgery when I was totally dependent on the right arm for everything. When you have tennis elbow the first thing you do is rest the elbow by not doing movements which irritate it (which is just about everything you do), then you start doing eccentric exercises. Due to the surgery on the left wrist I could not rest my right elbow so it became super painful, too painful for me to be able to do my wrist exercises. I was now in a catch-22, needing to rest the elbows yet exercise the wrist and unable to do either. On top of that my wrist therapist was afraid of aggravating my left elbow by doing therapy on my wrist that I couldn't do for myself. Despondent, I gave up all therapy for a month before making a very good decision to change therapists. I knew the elbows would eventually heal, but I was working on a fast approaching deadline for the scar tissue in the wrist.

As of today I cannot kayak at all due to the elbows, which are still painful but beginning to improve. I hope to start paddling short distances again in a few weeks. Therapy for the wrist is excruciating, but I am making progress. Though the doctor thinks I'll only get 60-75% of my range of motion back, the therapist thinks he can eventually get me to 100%. He says I'll be able to do whitewater again. Sure hope he is right! He is now able to push and pull my wrist to the same range of motion as the other wrist but my muscles are lagging way behind to do it myself. It is normal for active ROM to lag behind passive ROM by about 3 weeks but due to the tennis elbow my strengthening exercises have been extremely limited. Thank goodness the TE is finally healing and I can now work on strengthening!!

Barring another mishap, I have set my sights on joining you guys somewhere on the water sometime the first half of this summer. I've enjoyed reading this thread. Ken, you definitely made me laugh. Mike, sorry you missed your opportunity yesterday. Let's both plan on completing this scenic stretch next year! Ken, you are invited to join us. :-P

Ouch!
 

Erin... Wow! What are we going to do with you??

You might have to look into a whitewater Hobie!

Ken

Well, I'm glad someone got to do this section finally (with the park). So was this trip really as un-organized as it appeared?

And the shuttle... Hummmm.... We need to get Mike to try that!

Ken (again)

Actually I've got my eye on the creature craft inflatable roll cage. Talk about fun!

Wow! Just saw this discussion and read about Erin's adventure last year- pretty damn scary hope she's doing better now!

Hi JP....Thx for the great info. With the gauge at 5.2, how much clearance did you have under the low bridge downstream from 164?

With the gage at 5.2 and falling, we had about five feet of clearance at the low water bridge downstream of the Route 164 bridge.

Nice Pedal-n-Paddle trip
 

Floated this on Fri after getting some excellent advice from JP.

Gage was at 6.5 and falling.

Scraped in about 3 spots. Can’t imaging doing this when it’s much lower. Lots of spots looked pretty shallow.

Had about 5’ clearance below the low water bridge.

Took us about 2 hrs, but wasted 1/2 an hour fighting a tree across the river.

Two trees completely across the river. One a few minutes after Teegarden. Was able to duck under. One about half way. No way over or under. Water was about 3.5 ft and fast. Amateur mistake got me swamped. Had to portage around on right bank. Luckily it was flat and just weeds and mud.

Beautiful scenery. Great flow. Very little padding required.

For anyone considering this trip, want to share two excellent pieces of advice that I got from JP.

1. Scout the low water bridge for clearance and especially for wood caught under the bridge. River is very narrow and fast. I didn’t see any eddies. River banks are steep and jagged concrete. Portage is impossible in my opinion. I’d hate to come down there and find a problem. Park in the feed store at the NE corner and checkout the bridge.

2. Scout the Lisbon takeout to be sure you can recognize it from the water. Very small bare spot on the left bank. It’s immediately after the red Market St bridge. Tree growing in the water and a 12” rock marks the spot. River pretty fast here too, so be ready to paddle hard left when you pass the bridge. Nice eddy that easily fit a couple kayaks or more. Be careful when stepping out. Had a small ledge with about 1’ of water, but slipped off and had 2’ or more. Nice gravel ramp up to parking.

We considered taking out at Willow Grove, but bank was about 3’ vertical mud. Didn’t look like fun.

Really easy pedal-n-paddle. Might be one of the nicest bike trails in OH. Nice to have a picnic table to sit on to change into the water shoes. Very nice to have a bathroom at the end to change out of wet clothes.

We did this section because the main river in the park was too high. No complaints as a backup trip. Glad we did it. Thx JP for the original post that caught our eye and the great advice....Mike

p.s. If you find a yellow and blue bilge pump or gray and white polar bottle, they’re mine. Last time I saw them, they were headed for the gulf :-)