The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Pack your pleasure
An inexpensive, outdoors adventure — by land and by water — can be had very close to home
Painesville may seem to be an unlikely jumping-off point for a wilderness adventure, but looks can be deceiving.
While it is true that our piece of the state isn’t the same kind of wild, backcountry playground as Colorado, Maine or Utah, those of us in Northeast Ohio are gifted with a variety of outdoor pursuits. We have lush river valleys, scenic byways, hundreds of miles of hiking and biking trails and some wildlife viewing suitable for a National Geographic pictorial, if we look close enough.
Although we’re never too far from the hum of Interstate 90 and the hustle of Cleveland’s busy streets, it’s possible to get away from it all, right in our own backyards.
In September, I took an opportunity to prove it with a bicycle, a 10-dollar campsite reservation and a thing called a packraft.
My voyage led me on an 8-mile ride along one of Lake County’s most panoramic backroads, a 9-mile paddle through the Grand River’s wild and scenic corridor and a night under the stars at one of Lake Metroparks’ riverside tentcamping sites.
According to Lake Metroparks stats, these campsites are becoming more and more popular. As of Sept. 4, campers had logged 360 reservations in 2015 between the now-available seven campsites. That compares to all of 2013 and its 170 reservations and the 316 made during the entire 2014 season.
For me, my limited budget and my love of camping, it’s a no-brainer to look to these local campsites for quick, easy and local weekend getaways.
I live in Fairport Harbor, and all I had to do was step off my back porch and hop onto my $100 Craigslist mountain bike to find a little bit of solitude. I pedaled south through Painesville, then east along Erie Street and eventually toward Madison Township along picturesque River Road with all of its rolling fields and wooded, residential lots. All told, I covered about 25 miles round trip.
My first destination was Riverside Park off Bailey Road, where I’d inflate my boat, take my bike apart and strap on everything I’d carried with me for a three-hour paddle downstream to Lake Metroparks’ Baker Road Park. The park’s reservable tent-camping site has been gracing the south bank of the Grand River in Leroy Township for about three years, according to Lake Metroparks spokesman John Venen.
I spent about three hours floating and paddling through Madison Township’s part of the river to get to the park from where I put in. Along the way, the scenery shifts between thick, wooded parcels stocked with stately maples, poplar and evergreen trees and sheer cliffs that dwarf whatever floats below.
I caught a glimpse of about an eight-point buck my boat and I scared off, and whole families of geese, ducks and a great blue heron or two all flew by to monitor my progress down the river.
This being a Thursdaythough-Friday trip, the river was basically all mine. I didn’t encounter a single other paddler, although a couple of hikers found me Friday morning making coffee at my campsite.
I’d spent the previous day jamming a tent, food, clothing and other camping supplies into a pair of waterproof bike panniers I scored for a bargain online a few weeks earlier. And that morning I bungee-corded to my bike’s cargo rack a fourpiece kayak paddle, life vest and the key to the waterborne leg of my journey: a packraft.
Packrafts are insanely lightweight, inflatable, durable, whitewater-capable boats that have opened a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to traveling off the beaten path. In theory and in practice, they have been around as long as trekkers have encountered otherwise-impassable bodies of water, according to Tom Turiano, vice president of the American Packrafting Association.
“It’s not a new activity,” he said in a phone interview from Wyoming. “People have been doing it forever. It just goes along with our natural urge to travel by water.”
Thanks to the materials and technology available today, Alaskan adventurers and one woman’s ingenuity, the modern packraft has evolved into a formidable watercraft, capable of some amazing things for its size and weight.
Sheri Tingey is a longtime Colorado ski bum and river rat, according to her company’s website. She founded what’s arguably since become modern packrafting’s pioneering manufacturer, Alpacka Raft LLC, in 2001 in Chugiak, Alaska. It happened by chance after her son, Thor, a similarly adventure-minded individual, demolished a couple of the packable boats that were available at the time on a pair of extended bush treks in the Brooks Range.
Tingey said the packable boats available at the time were mainly geared toward fishing and calm-water use, not for river travel.
“Rarely could you make four miles in one of them before you were swimming in 40-degree river water,” she said. “So I wanted to make a boat you could use to actually run rivers.”
Fourteen years later, the boats she makes are doing things people likely never imagined, including being the basis of a new kind of wilderness adventure.
“I think in its early days it was just sort of a way to deal with different situations,” said Brad Meiklejohn, president of the American Packrafting Association. “But now people are designing trips around the boating part of it.”
Meiklejohn, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, and has been packrafting about 20 years, said back-country hunters are even using these boats as “meat wagons,” hauling dressed and quartered moose and elk out of the woods with them.
“Do you know how much a moose weighs?” he said.
Back here in Ohio, I’m not hauling hundreds of pounds of wild game meat on my own packraft. But it’s good to know I have that option and that my boat can take whatever punishment the Grand or any other area river can throw its way, especially considering how many miles I’ve already dragged the thing over the rocky bed of the Grand River during times of low water. What’s more, I discovered folded into a
great sleeping pad when I discovered I’d left my sleeping bag and pad behind.
I’ve taken several trips since May and each one has involved dragging the gearladen raft across rocky shallows.
After a night of sweet solitude, including a packed feast of bratwursts, sauerkraut and fried potatoes at
the Baker Road Campsite, I was off to finish my journey. Along the way, I aggravated a beaver, which slapped its tail against the river’s surface to voice his disapproval of my presence. I also drifted alongside numerous fish and watersnake specimens. Most memorably, though, a trio of young bald eagles escorted me downriver for most of my river trip.
By the time I got to Mason’s Landing Park on Vrooman Road on my second day, daylight was waning and I had a 9-mile bike ride home. So I dried out the best I could, packed up my raft and reassembled my bike. In less than an hour I was back home, hitting the shower.