We drew the Tripper ashore well upstream of the weir, carried around it, and then walked back to see what we could see. To be honest, I was disappointed. The four‑foot‑high dam didn’t look like much, and the meltwater‑swollen stream flowed over it smoothly, descending in a graceful arc. I was sure we wouldn’t have hung up on the lip if we’d continued downriver. And I certainly didn’t understand why Farwell had insisted on our portaging around it.
I was about to say so when he picked up a tree limb left behind by the spring floods and flung it wordlessly into the stream, just above the dam. The limb — as big around as my arm, and longer than I was tall — was swept away by the spirited current. It reached the weir in no time, plunged unhesitatingly over the drop, and then… I lost sight of it. A frothy apron extended some eight or 10 feet below the little dam. The swirling water didn’t look as if it could swallow up a whole tree limb without a trace. In fact, it seemed no more dangerous than the head on a glass of beer. But where had that tree limb gone? I couldn’t see it anywhere. Seconds passed. Nothing. How could I have missed its passage through the foam? Yet what other explanation was there? So I looked downstream. Still nothing.
Then Farwell nudged my shoulder. He pointed upriver, and I turned my face back toward the swirling water. There was the limb. It lay parallel to the face of the weir, caught in an almost imperceptible crease where the froth met the plunging torrent. It wasn’t going anywhere. But it wasn’t exactly dead in the water. On the contrary, the limb spun round and round, like a chair leg being shaped in a lathe. I watched it for several minutes. Every so often, some imperceptible alteration in the balance of forces would pull it under. There it would remain, sometimes for many seconds, only to pop up again and resume its restless spinning.
Now I imagined our canoe alongside it, spinning endlessly. And where were we in that picture? In the cold, meltwater‑fed stream, that’s where, alternately pulled down below the surface and pushed up, breathing only when the river loosened its grip on our bodies. Suddenly, I started shivering, and it wasn’t because there was a chill in the spring air.
Experienced boaters will be surprised at my naïveté, I know. But this was early in my canoeing career, and I’d never before taken a close look at the phenomenon whose name I was about to learn: keeper. Seldom was a name better chosen, since a keeper by name is a keeper by nature… Read more…
Contributing Photographer Tony Jancek recently shot a few pictures of the weir in relatively high water. Here are three of his photos, which can be enlarged by right-clicking inside their borders.
When seen from upriver the weir doesn’t look like much. If you weren’t paying attention, you might miss it altogether:
Until you went over it, that is. Thirty years have left their mark, but the weir is still an impressive sight:
Look carefully and you can see the concrete beneath the water:
Thanks, Tony, for bringing the story of the weir up to date. The passing of the decades has done nothing to lessen its ability to ruin a paddler’s day.
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