Whitewater Rafting: Penobscot River

There's nothing quite like a little white water rafting to set your summer right. Some camping in the wilderness of Northern Maine accompanied by friends. A day trip down a semi-tamed Penobscot River, a fine way to commune with nature and enjoy a small part of paradise.

We camped at Pray's Big Eddy Campground in Millinocket, ME, not far from the Canadian Border. In fact, we were closer to Canada than we were to home in Massachusetts. This area is the largest forested area in the United States on the west Branch of the Penobscot River. If you want to be away from everything, this is about as close to away from everything as you can get.

There were several other folks who had come along on the trip our friends had arranged, but we didn't really know them so the group of folks - about 8 of us - that we did know camped together, and rafted together. We had our laid back group while the rest of the bunch were...well, a little more "hearty" than were we. It seems they were interested in investigating their libation options.

On Sunday, we gathered ourselves and headed out to meet our guide - a wonderful young lady from Cumberland ME named Erin. She taught us about something called "Bug Kites," that no one in our group had ever heard of. Apparently back in the day she and her friends would catch these literally bird-size flies and tie a small string around them, then hold on as they tried to fly away. Now, this doesn't particularly strike me as being a great pasttime, but I'm not from Cumberland ME either.

The river was running about 31CFS - or 3100 cubic feet a second. We were told this is approximately equivalent to 3100 basketballs cascading over the river each second. The mental image of 3100 basketballs bouncing off one's head every second is a pretty good image - it was funny earlier in the day...until we actually "swam" a class II rapid. More on this later.

The Penobscot is controlled by releases from a paper company dam, so the river is pretty predicable for the most part.