Paddle with your Peeps - CKC Weekend

The Carolina Kayak Club had a trip this past Easter weekend down in the northeast corner of NC.  We camped at Pettigrew State Park in Tyrell and Washington Counties.  I joked it was the "historical boonies" of NC.  Tyrell County (which is actually where my husbands father was born and lived as a child), is the least populated county in NC and full of large farm fields.  This area has a lot of history.

One of many hollow Cedars

This area has a lot of history.  The park is named for a well known Confederate soldier and it  surrounds Somerset Place, a NC state historic plantation from the 1830's.  Part of the park surrounds Lake Phelps which is one of the oldest natural lakes in the eastern US (one of the NC bay lakes) and a former hunting and fishing ground for the Algonquian Native American peoples.  Dugout canoes up to 4,400 years old have been found here.   Some of the areas history can be read here.

I joined our small group (Ginger, Deb, and Craig) Thursday night.  On Saturday we paddled about 11 miles on the Alligator River from Gum Neck Landing where it is a half mile wide and upstream into a much narrower section to the Kilkenny Road Landing.  Much of this is part of the NC Coastal Paddle Trail and includes mile markers along the way.  This is low country, a freshwater marsh with some pocosin, pond pine, skinny cypress trees, and marshy grass.

I wasn't able to paddle with them on Sunday, needing to get home, but there were two other paddles on Sunday, a distance paddle circling South Lake off the Alligator River and Albemarle Sound, and the other a wildlife paddle on the Scuppernong River.

Great fun.