You’ve spent the past six months backpacking the Appalachian Trail.
As you walk off Springer Mountain in Georgia, with 2,180 miles on your hiking boots, your schedule is suddenly clear.
How about a 525-mile kayaking trip down the Chattahoochee River?
A national conservation group is developing a “water trail” — public recreation areas with boating access and other amenities every 10 to 15 miles along the river — that would give canoeists and kayakers a place to rest or resupply as they float down the river from north Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico.
The project, championed by The Trust for Public Land, is being billed as a means for Appalachian Trail hikers to ditch their hiking boots in north Georgia for paddles.
“I think people end up in the mountains of north Georgia and it’s like, ‘What do I do now? Is that it? Is that the end?’ ” said Curt Soper, the Georgia/Alabama state director for TPL. “Someone could get off at the end of the trail, go a few miles to the headwaters of the Chattahoochee, get a kayak or canoe and float all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Sally Bethea, executive director of the advocacy group Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said she was not aware of the trust’s plan until reading about it in media reports this month.
“It’s a big project. It’s exciting, at the thought of it,” Bethea said. “We would like to see the public be able to safely paddle the entire length of the river.”
It’s possible to make such a trip now, assuming that water levels are high enough, but it’s challenging because of the lack of public access spots and the need to transport kayaks or canoes around more than a dozen dams, Bethea said. One couple did it in 1995 and wrote a book about it.
Dave Gale’s Wildwood Outfitters rents kayaks, canoes or rafts to about 6,000 people in Cleveland each year.
“Anything that promotes the river, I’m all for it,” said Gale, whose customers float between Helen and Lake Lanier.
Some say, however, that marketing the river as a liquid extension of the Appalachian Trail is a stretch. The main reason is that most of those who hike the Appalachian Trail are heading in the opposite direction. They start in Georgia in the spring and head north.
A lesser issue is that the closest spot to put a kayak or canoe in the Chattahoochee is a bit of a, well, hike, from the AT – an hour or so by vehicle, outfitters say. The first 10 to 15 miles of the Chattahoochee’s headwaters are mostly too shallow to kayak on.
Zach Davis, 26, hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 2011, and then wrote a book, “Appalachian Trials.” He said that, after his five-month trek, he wasn’t in the mood for another adventure.
“I probably wouldn’t have done [a water trip],” said Davis, who now lives in Boulder, Colo. “I was ready to be done.”
But Davis said that some hikers would be game. In fact, he said, there’s a term for when hikers take to a canoe or kayak for part of a trail – “aquablazing.”
Ben LaChance, owner of Appalachian Outfitters near Dahlonega, said the additional recreation areas along the river will have broader appeal to all fun-seekers and water lovers, not just extreme sports junkies who take on the Appalachian Trail.
Wednesday morning, just as the sun rose above the Chattahoochee, kayaker Robert Swain pulled his Nissan Maxima up to the curb at Azalea Park in Roswell, his 18-foot kayak riding on the roof.
“It’s going to be 70 degrees today – a beautiful day,” he said.
Swain, 63, has been kayaking for 10 years; he’s got three different kayaks to show for it.
He said he doesn’t venture south of Atlanta; he generally takes eight- to 10-mile trips between Buford and Roswell. And he questions whether kayakers would gravitate to the south, considering that the whitewater and rapids are north of Atlanta.
But Swain acknowledged that additional public access sites would make trips south of Atlanta more appealing. “That’d help a lot,” he said.
Swain, a retired Georgia Department of Human Services official, said he’s never gone on a multi-day kayaking trip. But the Trust for Public Land’s project just might persuade him.
“It’d be fun,” he said. “You don’t have to do the whole thing, necessarily. I’d probably do stretches of it.”
The Trust for Public Land’s project started in 1998 as an attempt to conserve the Chattahoochee and its banks.
Since then, the trust and its government partners have acquired 17,000 acres – accounting for 76 river miles –from north Georgia to Columbus, Soper said.
The price tag so far: $145 million.
A couple years ago, the idea surfaced to use that land to develop boat access, parking lots and restrooms, to make the 525-mile paddle more convenient.
“It just kind of organically came, like, ‘All right, well, what comes next?’ ” Soper said. “It’s a little bit like the Appalachian Trail, only it’s a water trail. This is sort of similar, a way for boaters to get in and out of the water when they need to.”
It’s the most ambitious project the trust has tackled since the organization opened a Georgia office two decades ago. The nonprofit organization, which conserves land for people to enjoy for parks and other purposes, has bought about 23,000 acres in Georgia since 1991, the bulk of it for the Chattahoochee project.
Some, though, have painted the plan to be even bigger than it is. Earlier this month, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported that the trust planned to create a hiking trail along the river that essentially extended the Appalachian Trail to the Gulf of Mexico.
Soper said a land trail would be too costly, and property owners could foil the plan by refusing to sell.
“I just think the idea of truly extending the Appalachian all the way – that’s more than we can bite off,” Soper said.
He noted that the trust has not yet acquired land in Florida, where the Chattahoochee’s name changes to the Apalachicola.
The water trail should be complete in the next decade. The group needs about $20 million to $25 million more to buy land and develop the public access sites along the way.
Gale, the owner of Wildwood Outfitters, said his business has taken a dip in recent years. The economy has tanked. People don’t have discretionary income. School systems starting classes sooner have eaten into his revenue in August, once his most profitable month.
He hopes that the water trail will boost revenue by 30 or 40 percent. If the demand were there, he said, he’d offer guided trips to the Gulf of Mexico.
“I think it would certainly help it,” he said. “It’s going to help the bottom line.”
The river known as the ‘Hooch has come a long way since the 1990s, when the trust first began scooping up land for this project.
“It was kind of a forgotten, ignored stepchild, if you will, that no one really wanted to take ownership of or claim,” Soper said. “It was where we dumped our stuff, rather than where we invited people to come.”
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