Length of Trip: 8.3 miles (3-4 hours)
Starting Point:
Cliffs of the Neuse State Park access area 100 yards east of Highway 111 Bridge near Seven Springs, North Carolina.
Ending Point: Seven Springs Boat Access, 100 N. Main Street, Seven Springs, NC
Difficulty: Easy (although the State Park website lists the paddle as "advanced")
Resources:
Kinston, NC
Our trip down the Neuse River began with a pleasant evening in Kinston, North Carolina. My wife and I had been given a gift certificate to the
Chef and the Farmer Restaurant in Kinston, North
Mother Earth Brewery, have a decadent meal at the Chef and the Farmer restaurant, spend the night at the
Mother Earth Motor Lodge (a lavishly retro renovation of a classic Holiday Inn) and do some paddling on the Neuse River. Information about paddling on the Neuse River was scarce, there were no outfitters willing to shuttle us between the put-in and take-out and the last time I visited Kinston it was a down-on-its-luck place that looked like decaying set that might have been used in the Andy Griffith Show so we set our on our trip with some trepidation. Sometimes places and trips far exceed your expectations.
Carolina, which was expiring, so we decided that we needed plan an excursion to eastern North Carolina. The plan was to visit
When we arrived in Kinston at around 5 pm, the town looked deserted. Although it was a beautiful evening, we saw relatively few cars or people as we drove down the main street. I began to get worried that this trip might turn out to be a dud. We went directly to the Mother Earth Motor Lodge because there did not appear to be anything else to do. As we drove up to the hotel I realized that I had probably stayed in this motel shortly after it was built in the late 1960s as a Holiday Inn. The building looked better than new and the decor triggered a wave of nostalgia. At the front desk I waited for what seemed like forever, but was probably less than a minute, while the clerk, who was dressed in groovy attire from the seventies talked to somebody about repairs to her car. As I eavesdropped on the conversation I felt like I had stepped into an episode of the Andy Griffith Show. Once the clerk was off the phone she could not have been nicer. The clerk helped us find our room and a good place to park our vehicle which had a pair of kayaks hanging over the back bumper. She assured us that the kayaks would be safe and that there was no need to lock them up. (I pictured Barney Fife patroling the town in his squad car during the night.) She also gave us the inside scoop on things we might want to do and places we might want to visit while we were in town.
Many of the rooms at the motel appeared to be suits created by combing two of the original rooms, but we had arranged for a standard pet friendly room, which was small, but very comfortable. The biggest improvement over the original design was a modern min-split HVAC unit which was almost perfectly silent, but kept the room comfortably cool. In the original version of the Holiday Inn I can remember being grateful for air conditioning, but also being awakened periodically as the noisy AC until in the front wall cycled on and off. The new mini-split HVAC unit was a big improvement over the original. Outside of our room there was a large seating area with couches and cabanas over the entrance to the motel. The central courtyard had barbecue grills, a beautiful new pool and a small mini-golf course.
After refreshing ourselves and getting the dog settled, we decided to walk down the street two blocks to the Mother Earth Brewery. We were too late for the brewery tours, but the taproom was open. The bartender and other patrons were very friendly and we made ourselves comfortable on one of the retro couches while we sampled the local brews. My wife had one of our favorites (Dark Cloud) and I tried one of their specialty seasonal brews. Both were excellent.
Although our dinner reservation was not until 7:45 pm, we could hear the faint sound of live music outside so we decided to abandon the comfort of the taproom and find the source of the music. We walked another couple of blocks past a replica of the CSS Neuse (the remains of the original ironclad from the civil war sit inside a local museum) to the town park. It turns out that a local band was playing on the banks of the Neuse River to a crowd of about 30 people. We sat at a picnic table in the shade watching the Neuse River slowly flow by as we listed to a surprisingly good bad cover hits from the seventies as well as newer songs. It was the kind of experience that made you want to move to a small town.
Eventually, the time for our dinner reservation arrived. The Chef and the Farmer is a delightful farm-to-table restaurant with wonderfully creative offerings. It did not disappoint. Even the cocktails were creative. It is impossible to describe our food, but the tastes left us wishing for more.
The next morning, we decided to skip the free breakfast at the motel, and walk down the street to a local breakfast joint - Lovick's Cafe - which had been recommended by the hotel clerk. Although we were eating at 6:30 a.m. so that we could get an early start on the river while it was still cool, most of the regular customers looked like they had been at their table for hours. Once again, the food did not disappoint us. The eggs were cooked perfectly and the grits were some of the best, creamiest grits I have ever tasted. We also enjoyed hearing snippets of the conversations and bantering between the the regulars and the staff. I would not have been surprised to see Andy Griffith, Floyd the Barber and Howard Sprague sitting at the next table.
Getting Ready to Kayak
After a satisfying $12 breakfast for two, we started out towards the
Cliffs of the Neuse State Park, where I had been told they had a map showing the location of our put-in. I had tried to find the put-in on our drive to Kinston, but the only likely-looking spot near the Highway 111 bridge had a "no trespassing" sign on every tree. After a search through all the stacks of handouts behind the counter, the staff at the Cliffs of the Neuse Park located a crude map with instructions on how to find the semi-official put-in. The put-in was at the end of a narrow dirt track that went into the woods off of a side road about 100 yards east of the Highway 111 bridge. My F250 pick-up barely fit between the trees.
At the end of the track there was short trail that led down a steep bank to the Neuse River. There was a rope tied to a stake that made it easier to ascend and descend the slippery bank. We unloaded the kayaks and gear and I got back into my truck to drive it down to the take-out, which I thought would be a safer place to park the truck while we paddled. Although I had been unable to find an outfitter who would shuttle me between to take-out and put-in, we were mid-way between Goldston and Kinston, and there were some taxi companies in both of those towns. Unfortunately, each of the five taxi companies seemed to have only one cab, which was taking a customer to the opposite side of the county. None of them were able to give me a ride within the next hour. I tried the Uber and Lyft apps, but they reported that no cars were available. Just when I was about to try to hitchhike, I got a response to my Uber request. The driver was about a 30 minute drive away, but he was willing to pick me up. After waiting 30 minutes, and a very pleasant driver picked me up on his way home from his job on the night shift. The ride cost me $30 but it was better than hitchhiking.
Kayaking on the Neuse
I had been unable to find any good description of section 14 of the Neuse River, but I was hoping that it would be interesting and scenic because it passed through the Cliffs of the Neuse State Park. I was a little bit apprehensive because the state park website listed the difficulty of the section as "advanced." The satellite photos of the river on Google maps made it appear as if there might be some rapids. Furthermore, the park staff had warned us to be careful about the large number of trees down which created strainers. The staff indicated that some areas were so shallow that we might have to pull our boats through the mud.
As we started out down the river, I expected to encounter rapids around every bend. Instead, we experienced a slowly moving river with lots of wildlife and very few human structures visible from the river. For our entire trip we encountered a strong headwind and if I stopped paddling the boat generally drifted slightly upstream. In part this was because the main current of the river was often passing under trees where we could not pass so we often found ourselves in eddies passing over sand bars in less than a foot of water. In hindsight, we could have paddled upstream as easily as we paddled downstream, but that would not be true if the river was higher or the wind was blowing from a different direction.
For the most part, the banks of the river were covered with willows and cypress trees with root networks extending out into the river. Due to high water levels a few weeks earlier there were a large number of trees that appeared to have recently fallen into the river, but they were easy to avoid. The river tended to be very shallow (and sometime impassable) in the middle of the river, and deepest on the outside of the curves where the trees were down. We saw several groups of deer along the river, as well as snakes, turtles, muskrats, heron, hawks, turkey vultures, owls, perhaps an eagle, and many other birds.
Even though we knew that we were passing through The Cliffs of the Neuse State Park, it was still surprising to come around a bend and see a large rock cliff extending up 90 feet from the sandy river banks. The cliffs extend for about 600 yards before retreating back into the sand. Although we passed through the park, and were within shouting distance of a scenic overlook at the top of the cliffs, there was no obvious way to get from the river to any of the facilities in the park.
After we passed the cliffs, it was a relatively short time before my wife called out that she could see a bridge (and a jet ski) ahead on the river. The Wildlife Resources Commission boat access was designed with a steep concrete ramp to unload power boats from a trailer so it was easy to use the ramp to exit the river and load our vehicle. The town of Seven Springs, where the ramp is located is very small, but it has one restaurant (which is open until 2 pm) that is about 50 yards south of the boat ramp.
Summary
This was a very pleasant, easy paddle with lots of wildlife and very few human intrusions. There was 4 feet of water at the
river gage in Goldston, North Carolina on the day that we paddled. At much higher water levels the downed trees could be dangerous and at lower water levels it would be difficult to paddle over some parts of the river. We had been warned that the level of the river could increase quickly if there were thunderstorms in the Raleigh area, and that it took several hours for the floodwaters to make their way from Raleigh to Kinston, but we did not encounter any dramatic changes in water levels.
