River Miles for Ohio Rivers and Creeks
 

River Miles for Ohio Rivers and Creeks

I was thinking about our paddle on the Pymatuning Creek this past Sunday, Aug 25, 2019 and started reading Matthew Smith's document that set the stage for it being designated as "Wild and Scenic" this past December 2018. Wow! 135 pages. An interesting read. There are considerable references to study locations and river mile marks.

So where do those river mileages come from? And where are they? I went down the "rabbit hole" googling for river mile distances.

Back in the Pymatuning study it was noted the river miles used were from the Ohio EPA. Bingo! I was expecting some sort of official information on our rivers. What I found was an electronic version of copies of topo maps (of the entire state of Ohio) that have hand measured and penciled in mileages along with some other mystery info. While this is hard to read and decipher it is the only source of river mileages that I am aware of other than some of the water trail maps. Possibly useful for planning out a trip.

This site is slow to load so be patient. It's also difficult to print out a page that is legible. The print routine doesn't work for me. I found a screen copy or screen capture utility did the best. -KenM

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappvi...3ac43d2914d25e

Mahoning River source
 

For those that are interested.... This EPA map shows the source of the Mahoning River is north and west of Guilford Lake near Rt 9. It starts just above a wetland noted as Watercress Marsh.

The source is noted as 102.09 miles !!

KenM

Ken, Thanks for the link. Those topo maps are tough to figure out! River mile might be the easiest of the hand-written items to decipher. I've seen a much cleaner map of the Allegheny that has river miles printed on it. Perhaps rivers that have more commercial traffic have better maps with mileage markers???

In the days before computer mapping, Ed Gertler, author of paddling guides for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, once told me he used a piece of string to measure river distance for his guide books. He would mark the string in tenths of a mile according to the scale of the topo map he was consulting. Then he would carefully lay the string atop the map and conform it to the river as printed on the map and measure the distance between put ins and take outs. Not very high tech, but reasonably accurate.

Wow, that is cool.
But very hard to read.

Once you add the west branch of the Mahoning river in the total mileage is 114 per ODNR
They list west branch a total of 12 miles from the dam to confluence of the east branch.
But if you include west branch reservoir and river upstream toward ravenna it's actually 25 miles

On the east branch I have paddled 80 of the 102 miles.
On the west branch i have done 12 miles (never again) did more portages then paddle time