Down The River
Even though I’d spent the entire week packing and planning, I still found myself squatting on the living room floor at 11pm the night before my flight, hurriedly moving items between three hulking bags. I quickly stepped on and off a cheap bathroom scale purchased from Target just several hours earlier, holding each of the bags in my arms, sagging under the weight.
Two of the bags weighed nearly 48 pounds and I worried about the accuracy of the scale. Just a few pounds over could mean an additional $150 fee each way, making this trip exorbitantly more expensive. I pulled out long cinch straps and wrapped my bags tight, trying to make them appear smaller. In addition to being nearly overweight, they were also definitely oversized. Getting two paddle boards and all my camping equipment onto a plane was proving much more difficult than I expected.
Later, lying in bed wide awake with pre-trip jitters, my mind began to churn. Why was I doing this? In just a few hours, I would be flying out of prime canyon country, gorgeous backcountry wilderness, and some of the best rivers the U.S. has to offer, for a muddy, slow-moving Pennsylvania river along 130 miles of urban diaspora. I tossed and turned for most of the night.
Early the next morning, not certain I had slept, I was on a plane to Pittsburgh, my overloaded bags miraculously incurring no further fees. My friend Phebe met me at my layover in Denver and by late afternoon, we were zipping up I-79 in my mom’s Rav 4, breathing in the muggy Pennsylvania summer.
That evening after my mom headed out for the night, Phebe and I sat on the deck of my family’s cabin in Slippery Rock watching hundreds of fireflies shimmer in the trees. We turned off all the cabin lights and sat there under the heaviness of the humidity, reveling in a night so wet and thick you could almost part it with your hands. This was no wilderness. The neighbors were blasting music and setting off a couple early fireworks before the fourth of July. And I could hear the cars along Route 8 just on the other side of the bank, through a small stand of trees, the traffic interrupted here and there by the low hum of a bullfrog.
This was home, the place I’d grown up, and a place I’d never particularly thought of as “outdoorsy” or “wild.” I suppose that’s why I was doing this. By paddling 130 miles down the Allegheny River over four days, I could prove that breathtaking multi-day adventure could be found anywhere — so long as you had the personal gumption to make it happen. Like Annie Dillard turning suburban Virginia into a hermit’s retreat in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, I could weave a story from the industrial Allegheny as thrilling and unbroken as those of the Colorado.
Kinzua Dam parking lot - prepping our gear
We made our way north to Kinzua Dam on the morning of July 4th where half my family and some family friends were meeting Phebe and I to paddle the first 15 miles of our trip. The day was already hot and mist rose off the dewy fields like a thin strip of fog weighing down the atmosphere. When we arrived, the parking lot was steaming. It took an hour to fill our boards with air, walk them down to the concrete boat ramp, and strap down all our gear. Phebe was urging me to get my board into the water while I was still fidgeting around with carabiners and wiping streams of sweat out of my eyes. That’s when we heard a pop like a gunshot.
The family friends who had driven several hours to meet us stood over one fully inflated board and one limp board which dripped over the edge of the concrete ramp like a Dali melting clock. Phebe and I quickly picked up my loaded-down board and slid it into the water, away from the hot concrete.
It was 11am and we had 33 miles of paddling ahead of us. I made hints that we needed to get going soon. Our friends stood over their saggy paddle board debating what to do while the rest of my family (mom, two aunts, and an uncle) put their kayaks and boards in the water.
“Guess we’re going for a hike instead today,” our friends said. And with that, we waved goodbye and pushed off into the river.
The first 30 miles of this trip — Kinzua Dam to Tidioute — were familiar river miles. I’d kayaked this stretch once on an overnight trip when I was 18 and again four years later my senior year of college. It had been a decade since I’d been on this river, but I remembered the paddling was through mostly flat water minus a few riffles and at just 15 miles a day, had been accomplished fairly lazily. I figured if I’d done 15 miles in a day without much effort, that 30 miles in a day with a fair amount of effort wouldn’t be difficult. Plus, Phebe and I were tough mountain women who regularly pounded out long days of bikepacking, mountain biking, and backcountry skiing. How hard could it be to float down a river for 6-8 hours a day?
Trip from 2011
Those first 15 miles passed easily. I chatted with my family, remarked on how everything looked exactly the same as it had 10 years ago, and scanned the sky for bald eagles (of which there were dozens). Phebe slipped into the fold like we’d grown up together. We pulled off on a bank at a park for lunch just before Warren which even from several miles away was raucous with fire engines and sirens and fireworks for the fourth of July. Kids screamed as they ran down to the water in inner tubes, someone in a nearby parking lot was pumping country radio from their car, and I felt the mirage of my own fortitude slip.
“Not exactly serene, huh?” my uncle said as I squeezed a packet of tuna onto a damp tortilla.
“Not really,” I said. I was very suddenly aware of the tenderness of my undergraduate self, holding an acceptance letter to the University of Colorado Boulder for a Master’s degree in journalism, knowing she was finally getting out. That 21-year-old girl who wanted to put thousands of miles between herself and this industrious landscape.
We packed up lunch and paddled on, passing Warren, the horns, the Trump flags, and floated next past the United Refining Company, which smelled like ass and clanked and groaned and roared and blew a massive pipeline of water into the river creating a small strip of class II rapids. Ahead of us on an island stood a great concrete cylinder burning off a pale orange flame of fumes and gasses. In the dense humidity, I envisioned all the chemical components of that off-gassing falling right back onto the river, right where we were breathing, just 15 miles upstream from where we’d filter our water that night for dinner.
The refinery was ugly. Uglier than I’d remembered. And I felt my determination slip a little further. If these people who currently called this river bank home weren’t going to try and make it beautiful, why was I trying to do it for them? What exactly was it again that I was trying to prove?
Soon after the refinery, my family pulled off the river and said goodbye.
“See you in a few days!” I said to my mom cheerfully, even though I already had a sneaking suspicion that I was encountering an ugliness I didn’t want to subject myself to for the next three days.
Phebe and I paddled 15 more miles, pulling our boards through shallow sections of river and waving to the dozens of people out on the porches of their riverside cabins. In moments, it felt more like paddling through the backyards of suburban neighborhoods than a meandering, wild river.
When we finally passed Tidioute around 6pm — the last section of river I was familiar with — my arms were aching and my stomach was growling.
“We should be able to camp out on the next island,” I said as we passed under the bridge and I double-checked my map. We were both excited to pull up our boards and make dinner.
But as we approached our favored island, a firecracker so big and so loud shot off, I nearly fell off my board. The island was surrounded on the opposing banks by cabins, all blaring music, all shooting off fireworks. With the river as low and narrow as it was, we’d barely be 100 feet away from these people’s homes. We’d just be staring into their backyards all evening, and they’d be staring straight into our tents.
“Let’s keep going,” Phebe said as another blast of eardrum-shattering fireworks set off. I agreed, even though my arms were protesting.
We paddled on, got further out from the homes, and found a somewhat quieter stretch of river. We set up camp in the near dark and took a dozen or more attempts to throw a rope up over a high branch to hang our food. The fireworks dragged out long into the evening as did a particularly loud playlist of the same nine patriotic songs that played on repeat for several hours. By the time the rain began to fall around 11pm, my head was jammed full of Neil Diamond’s Proud To Be An American that not even the steady patter of rain on my tent could drown out. But the weather did shut down the fireworks. All that lingered was the thick scent of gunpowder, clinging to the saturated air.
The next morning I woke to the still drizzling rain, watching a parade of chunky bugs make their way across the outside of my tent. My sleeping bag felt like a damp plastic shopping bag against my skin in all that humidity as I peeled it back from my bare arms and legs.
By 8am, the rain subsided and Phebe and I slipped out of our tents and boiled filtered river water for coffee. We’d barely finished breakfast before the lawnmowers started up.
“People in the East and their fucking lawns,” Phebe said.
“Jesus Christ I know.” And then we packed our backcountry gear back into dry sacks and tied the bags down to our boards, ready for another 35 miles of paddling while people just a couple hundred feet away mowed their lawns.
Just 10 years ago this river seemed like some grand outdoor adventure. Now it seemed like we were just playing at homelessness for a couple of days, “camping” next to towns and homes and neighborhoods for reasons even I was having trouble justifying.
That second day dragged. The water barely moved and we shifted around constantly from standing to kneeling to sitting and back up again, trying to stretch our backs and shoulders, watching the dot on the GPS inch along the blue line of the river at a heartbreakingly slow pace.
We passed dozens, maybe a hundred more cabins that may have just been homes. In the big, deep flat sections of water, people drove motor boats around in circles for the couple hundred feet available before the river shallowed back out again. Phebe and I joked that the first person to offer us a burger or a beer, we’d without question take them up on it. But no one did. And I grew more annoyed at the people in the motorboats and party docks staring at us like aliens.
As we ticked off miles, the river got more crowded with floaters — kids in inner tubes, men fishing off metal motor boats a pole in one hand, a beer in the other, people seated in kayaks just resting their paddles across their laps, letting the river take them at barely a mile or so an hour. We weaved the boards around the crowds, dodged the motor boats and jetskis, explained over and over again to sunburned folks in cutoff tees what a paddle board was, how it worked, how much it cost.
Five hours and 20 miles of paddling into the day, we let the boards drift as we spooned tuna onto tortillas again for lunch. On one side of the river I spotted a green heron, a blue heron, and a steady stream of belted kingfishers. On the other side were a pair of bald eagles. It was beautiful. But it was also middling.
I don’t remember who suggested it first, but around the same time Phebe and I both proposed that perhaps we get to camp that night, paddle one more day, but call it at the end of the third day.
This plan seemed reasonable. A couple of nights on the river and 100 miles of paddling, I could walk away content with that. Three hours later when we approached our next campsite, I was already mentally formulating the request text to my mom to pick us up a day early and 30 miles short.
As we approached the last island for the next dozen or so miles — the only place we could legally camp — I noticed a strange anxiety building up in my gut. Unlike the islands we’d passed the day before, the last few that we’d drifted by were incredibly overgrown. As we came up to our island around 6:30pm, I couldn’t see a place to pull into. The thing was growing chest high with plants and grasses, the bank a steep dropoff several feet above the water. We’d have to hand our bags and boards up over our heads to get them onto the island and from there it was unclear if we could even tamp the brush down enough to set up a single tent, let alone have any space to cook dinner.
“This isn’t promising,” I said to Phebe as we paddled to the edge of the island. We got off our boards, made a tentative leap up onto the island and shook our heads. This wasn’t going to work. I pulled out the map. Up ahead was one more tiny spit, the last tiny island where we could camp before hitting Oil City.
“Let’s go check it out,” Phebe said. By now, I was starving and exhausted. I had very little paddle power left in me and hauled myself another quarter mile down the river to the rocky spit. As we approached, I knew we were fucked. It was an island of sorts, but really just river rocks sitting slightly up out of the water filled with mud and more tall grasses.
We got off our boards again and stepped into the marsh. There were no trees on this little section meaning we wouldn’t be able to get our food up off the ground away from raccoons and black bears. We stepped around the mud and rocks realizing there was nowhere to throw down a tent either. Several red-winged blackbirds screamed at us from their perches in the high sedges.
“We could just sleep on our boards?” Phebe pitched, but I balked.
“I’m definitely not doing that,” I said. That’s when I looked down at my feet and saw the bright yellow yolks of broken eggs. I picked up a shell. The eggs were the exact size and shape of ping pong balls and leathery in texture.
“Shit,” I said. “I think I just destroyed a turtle’s nest.” I squatted down into the mud for a closer look and saw dozens of broken turtle eggs, the yolks sucked out. Then I noticed little piles of freshwater mussel shells next to even larger piles of long black turds.
“Oh no,” I groaned. I looked around and saw the tiny island was littered with these piles. “This is just a little raccoon feeding ground. Even if we can set up a tent, we’ll be fighting off raccoons all night.” Phebe groaned too. We walked back to our boards and deliberated. We were too exhausted to paddle another dozen miles to the next island, especially since we couldn’t guarantee that one would be campable either. The banks of the river were private property filled with cabins, houses, and no trespassing signs. There was nowhere else for us to go.
We both agreed: Just 70 miles in, we’d have to call my mom for a rescue pickup for the lamest reason ever — we had nowhere to sleep and were too tired to paddle further.
Really terrible shot of Raccoon Island. This little patch of rocks filled with raccoon poop was the only place to even attempt to set up tents. Just behind those trees on the opposite bank were homes with yards and people looking right out onto our “campsite.”
We packed the boards up one more time and paddled a few more miles past Oil City to a dirty concrete boat ramp where two adults and their toddler were making lazy attempts at fishing. We let the air out of our boards with a defeated whoosh and sat there in the mud waiting for my mom, boiling one more pot of river water for one more freeze-dried meal. It was 8pm and growing dark. Just a little ways up the river, we’d passed tents not of campers along the banks, but of people without homes, without anywhere else to go. I felt disgust with myself but also with what industry and development had created.
Phebe and I aren’t new to adventures not going quite to plan. In 2023, we attempted to bike the entire Kokopelli Trail in just three days and ended up falling short by about 30 miles after the route unexpectedly kicked our asses. Even just a couple of weeks ago we tried to camp up near Aspen on a bustling Friday night and found ourselves camped out instead in an air conditioned hotel room when we couldn’t find a single open site anywhere nearby. None of these misadventures hurt the way this one did. This one felt personal.
I’ve starfished all night, holding down the four corners of my tent through a sudden Wyoming thunderstorm that ripped across the open high prairie. I’ve collected snow and chopped the wood to boil it for drinking water in between backcountry ski laps. I’ve slept in the desert in a drafty tent with the flu, frozen my ass off through unexpectedly cold winter nights in the mountains, and otherwise suffered my way through plenty of outdoor adventures. I could have added “fought off raccoons for a night while a river soaked through the ground into my tent” to that list, but it seemed like the dumbest reason to suffer.
There was no gorgeous serene view we were getting out to, no monumental canyon to explore. We were just floating down a dirty urban river to prove it could be done. Or maybe to prove that a place like Pennsylvania was just as beautiful on the whole as a place like Colorado. I was hurting because Pennsylvania had proven me wrong. Or maybe because no one had asked me to prove such a thing in the first place.
My mom arrived cheerily for having been unexpectedly pulled from her evening (though she was only 40 minutes away) and even snagged us a few apologetic beers. I was grateful, defeated, and wrestling with something bitter.
As we pulled away from the boat ramp, she pointed to a patch of grass across the road which was only a couple hundred feet away from a strip of rundown buildings.
“You couldn’t have just camped there for the night?” I stared at her for a moment, realizing she wasn’t being intentionally disparaging.
“Mom, that’s…” I paused. I shook my head. “Are you serious? That’s not legal. And it’s definitely not safe.”
“Really?” she said. “I just figured you could camp anywhere along a river so long as you stayed pretty close to shore.”
I wondered if anyone had suggested that to the folks in the encampments upstream.
By 10pm, Phebe and I were back at the cabin, showering two days of river gunk off our bodies, lounging on the leather couch, not even 48 hours out from when we’d left.
“I don’t for a single second regret that we’re not camped out on Raccoon Island right now,” I said to her, wrapping my wet hair in a clean towel.
“One hundred percent agree,” she said. I picked at my skin, thinking.
“But I’m also pretty disappointed this wasn’t what I thought it would be,” I finally said.
Western Pennsylvania sits right in the trifecta of Midwest, Northeast, and Appalachia. It’s somehow all of these regions and none of these regions at the same time. Growing up, I didn’t understand how one area of the country could be so different from another until I moved to Colorado and had the sudden feeling that I was living in a completely different part of the world. And in a way, I was. Public land makes up 43% of Colorado while in Pennsylvania just 16% of the state is publicly owned. The rules are different. The outdoors are different. And because of that, the culture is different.
The Allegheny River itself is public land (at least the 130 mile stretch we had planned to paddle), but for the most part, that protection stops as soon as the water hits the shore. Which means you can paddle down the thing if you want (and camp along the islands inside of the river), but it’s a little like biking along the shoulder of a highway. Why do it if you could do something else?
I suppose just a few months out from another polarized election, I had this image in my head of going back to Trump country and showing that “you people” have no idea what’s in your own backyard. But they of course did know, which is why on a 4th of July weekend the little islands dotting the Allegheny weren’t overcrowded with tourists and travelers like ourselves and were overgrown with disuse.
Western Pennsylvania (and so much of the East) is developed. It’s not centered around outdoor adventure. It’s gorgeous and forested and full of critters, but the privatization of land just makes it really different from the millions of acres of public, utterly un-industrialized land out West — managed specifically for outdoor recreation.
I know I sound snide. But I do love Pennsylvania. And I especially love Pittsburgh. But I’d created a false narrative in my head about what it was, or rather, should be. The following morning after our failed paddle board trip, Phebe and I ventured into the city for museums and cocktails and forested walks in the parks of the city center. We Zillow-ed homes. We only half-joked about moving there. We looked at house-sitting gigs. And I envied my brother who would be moving back to the city in just a few weeks for grad school — a perfect excuse to sneak in two more years of Pittsburgh life.
When I flew back to Colorado a few weeks later on the tiny flight from Denver to Grand Junction, I wondered if I might ever move back to Pittsburgh, writing out the pros and cons on the back of a receipt. And then the sparkle of the Colorado River caught my eye out the plane window, as well as the sheer vastness of the Book Cliffs which rippled like crumpled velvet along the edge of the valley and I folded up the receipt and placed it in the trash bag the stewardess held out as she walked down the aisle, preparing for landing.
