River Odyssey, Schoolhouse of Wonder’s second offering in our Teen Adventure Series, is a collaboration with Frog Hollow Outdoors. Our journey into the wild beauty of a wilderness river is an unparalleled opportunity to explore the amazing water jungles of North Carolina’s coastal plain. Home to the black bear, river otters, bobcat and mink, the Roanoke River contains some of the largest intact bottomland hardwood swamp forest east of the Mississippi. We will be visiting and spending nights in large backwater swamps, where the skies are dark and lit with stars, the waters bordered by thousand year-old bald cypress trees and towering tupelos decorated with mistletoe and Spanish moss. More than two-hundred species of birds, including bald eagles, osprey, anhinga (snake-bird) and cerulean warblers, reside on the Roanoke. The fishing is good too, with striped and largemouth bass, black crappie, river herring, hickory shad, lunker catfish, bowfin and gar.
Beginning on Sunday afternoon June 13th our river explorers set out from Gardner’s Creek in Martin County, paddling five miles to the canoe camping pad, Beaver Lodge, on Deadwater Creek off Devil’s Gut, deep in the cypress-tupelo backwater. Beaver Lodge is our grand opportunity to enjoy the amenities of “civilization”. There are two platforms connected by a boardwalk with a privy between them. The following day’s paddle we slip down the Roanoke past Jamesville and into what are like the bayous of eastern North Carolina. Our destination is the pad on Cow Creek in the swamp forests at the large bend of the river’s channel, tucked in behind the bank near drifts of blue flag iris. Tuesday’s journey takes us deeper into the swamps as we leave the main river channel, heading east into the deep recesses of Broad Creek. This is wild country, true American wilderness and our trip’s most remote excursion into the heart of darkness. You have arrived!
Suffice it to say, the bowels of these gothic swamps provide a fine backdrop for a night of ghost story-telling. The next day we will take time to explore through the back swamps and experience the enchantment of the Spanish moss covered cypress and tupelo forests and, if conditions permit we will slosh our way knee-to-waist deep through the green muck-an-mire of these magnificent bottomlands. On Thursday we paddle and slow-float downstream to Bear Run, beginning our reemergence into civilization. This might be our week’s most sophisticated platform, as the “privy” is located along the boardwalk and the sounds of civilization can be heard again.
Friday involves our longest paddle of the week. We plan a mid-day walk through historic Plymouth. In 1864, the Confederacy supported by the CSS Albermarle, an ironclad ship constructed in a cornfield on the Roanoke River, recaptured the town of Plymouth. A month later a Union Naval officer tucked a torpedo under the deck sinking the Albemarle. She was raised in 1867 and sold for junk. The battered smokestack of the CSS Albermarle made its way to Raleigh, where it’s now on display at the NC Hall of History.
Our last night on the river is spent at Royal Fern off what is locally called White Marsh Creek. Though we will be in bear country throughout the entire trip, Royal Fern is located in the heart of bear country. Our noble trip leaders will help and guide us in the necessary preparations, storing our food in air-tight containers away from the tents and sleeping area. It is an adventure!
Each day along our way we’ll be enriched and entertained by “Roanoke Readings”, a special selection of natural and cultural histories derived from the Roanoke River region. The first days’ readings originate from the fishing culture of Eastern North Carolina, day three and four from the natural histories of the eastern swamplands and the final days from the genre of Civil War history.
River Odyssey, from June 13-19, is open to young people ages 12-16.
