Ichetucknee River - North End

If a guest from outside "Florida's Eden" asks why you live here, the Ichetucknee is where you take them.  I need to be specific: you do not take them to the Ichetucknee that involves alcohol- and hamburger-gorged hoards floating by the thousands on inner tubes, sunscreen slicks trailing behind them. You wait until after Labor Day and then head for the North entrance as soon as it opens in the morning (8AM) and then paddle to the Midpoint and back (or further, if you're feeling particularly bullish, and it is a mighty upstream paddle).  You won't need any other justification.  If clear, cold water, herons, ibises, egrets, wood storks, kingfishers, pileated woodpeckers, ducks, otters, cardinal flowers, and abundant eel grass--all in the first mile--don't do it for them, they are beyond redemption.

I've done this run before, but I am gobsmacked every time I do. Downstream, your paddle is necessary only for steering, as the current is strong and accelerates as you hit successive springs.  The temptation is to drift all the way to the Santa Fe, to the Suwannee, and out to the Gulf. But then there's the matter of getting back.  It would almost be worth it. We did not see another human being until we got back to the dock, and he only because I had suggested it to him earlier that morning. Call me a misanthrope, but paddling is not something I do well in a crowd. A social person who normally craves the company of others, on the water I prefer to imagine that I am the last man alive. We made the mistake of paddling the Silver River on Labor Day. After we'd sucked in our fifth lungful of motor exhaust and slalomed our third party of Aging Singles Clubs Out On The River, we retreated and I swore never again.

This paddle made up for all that and then some. Accustomed to death-black water and the great unknown beneath me, here I could see every catfish and turtle and felled tree, every gush of new water from the invisible river under the river. I wanted to fall over the side and let the cold seep into me (re-entering a kayak en route is still an untested skill at this point). I wanted to talk back to the otters who snorted at me as I invaded their stretch of eel grass.

Turning around at Midpoint Launch seemed like sacrilege, but we had been fronted the goods by taking the downstream leg first, and now it was time to pay up. But of course, there was no hardship in this. Psychologically, it was humbling to watch trees crawl by, whereas downstream we passed them quicker than we wanted, but since we merely drifted down, the upstream leg only took 15 minutes longer and as we broke through the swirling springs, the current slowed.


John Moran, a photographer who has done more than anyone to document this miraculous place, calls the Ichetucknee a "sacred river," and of course it is. For this reason, I prefer to encounter it when that sacredness does not involve the masses they run through here in the summer.


Tomorrow: Prairie Creek.