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Yesterday I went on a spur-of-the-moment paddling trip with my friends Joe and Brian. I've wanted to paddle the Turkey and Stevens creeks ever since a missed attempt in 2001. The area has very steep banks and the water level is often too high or too low for safe paddling. Combine that with busy schedules and it's a creek you can't paddle too often. But Monday's steady rains had provided the right amount of water for a run, so we jumped at the opportunity.

(See the photo album)

We parked two vehicles at the take-out (SC 23 at the Modoc Bridge) and drove up to the put-in (Edgefield County Road 68 at the Key Bridge) in Brian's truck. As we were preparing, we saw a huge limb break from a tree across the creek and crash to the ground. It reminded me of the "if a tree falls in the woods" philosophy question. Well, we heard this one fall!

By the time the boats were loaded, the fog had burned off and the sun appeared. The put-in is on a slope with some muddy wooden stairs and a space next to it for sliding boats. We had to lower the boats down the slope with ropes on the bows and sterns of the kayaks. Then it was off on the Turkey Creek! The water level was running at nearly 4 feet when we got underway, and was still rising.

We got underway at about 11:45 AM and were soon in a totally wild area surrounded by huge trees and steep banks, leading up to high bluffs. The temperature was perfect: 60s increasing to the low 70s by the afternoon. Every once in a while we'd round a bend into an area where the bluffs blocked a lot of the sun, and the temperature would drop noticeably.

This area was apparently affected by glacial activity, and we passed several interesting rock formations along the banks. Some rocks appeared to have been compressed flat layers, then turned upward at an angle and broken off, leaving a jagged edge. The rocks I saw in the middle of the creek were smoother, but I'd hate to impact one of the sharper ones hidden by high water.

The water was flowing well and we moved quickly downstream. It wasn't long before we hit a fairly strong rapid...at least it was the biggest one I've ever paddled in my flatwater 14.5 foot kayak. I made it through unscathed, and even enjoyed it. Brian had gone through first and snapped a great shot of my run.

Along our route we passed dozens of large cypress and sycamore trees. It's unusual and wonderful to see the cypress trees in a rocky and hilly setting; I'm used to seeing them in the lowcountry swamps. Brian and Joe noted that they didn't see any smaller cypress trees and wondered if the conditions had changed since the big ones took root. As we reached the confluence with Stevens Creek, a breeze blew in and a big cloud of pollen drifted down from one of the trees on the bank. I'd never seen such a thing.

When we reached Stevens Creek, the creek widened a bit and straightened out some. There was a little less whitewater too. Joe and Brian had paddled this stretch nearly a year ago on a Palmetto Paddlers trip, and Joe had told me of a visible drop-off in the water that we had to run. I was anticipating it the whole way, but the drop never came...apparently the higher water covered it all up.

At one point we came to a small rapid and I rode up over a concealed tree that slowed me down for a few seconds. I turned and saw Brian coming up on it, thinking that he knew about it, but he didn't see it and it caught him and turned his shorter kayak sideways. He made a nice save by scooting across while bracing himself on the bow of Joe's kayak.

The wildlife was quite active. We spent a lot of time floating with the current and quietly listening to our surroundings. There were ducks, hawks and other birds along the way. We spotted several deer up on the high banks, and even saw one exiting the water for higher ground. Joe and Brian saw an otter pass right by my kayak, but I was looking for it further in the distance and missed it. I did get to see a beaver make a close inspection of our group. One beaver spent a long time slapping its tail, possibly to warn others of our visit. We also ran across several turtles enjoying the sun.

It didn't take us long to get down the Stevens Creek and before we knew it, we heard traffic on the Modoc Bridge and saw the stairway for the take-out. The take-out was similar to the put-in, but did not have a space next to the stairs for sliding the boats out, so we had to haul the boats right up the stairs. Brian got out first, but his boat slipped his pull rope and Joe and I had to chase down the kayak in the steady current. Once we were out, we sat down for lunch, since the water level really left us no good place to stop along the length of the trip. We finished around 2:30 PM...it was a quick 7+ mile trip!

I used GPSVisualizer to make a map of the trip. I used the color-by-speed option and you can see where some of the rapids were by the higher speeds. You can also have a look at the GPS track coordinates and a graph of the water levels for February 21-22.

Many thanks to Brian and Joe for including me on a fascinating trip!

Some links:

• USGS Water Gauge at the Modoc Bridge
• South Carolina Trails' Turkey/Stevens Creek Description (and map)
• Canoe Augusta's Turkey/Stevens Creek page (dated but good info)
• Sumter National Forest Turkey/Stevens Creek Flyer (PDF)

Tonight I got hit with a custom spam. Somebody actually took the time to fill out my custom contact form and submit it. The content contained a pyramid scheme with names and addresses.

Update 2007-01-12:The apology below looks legitimate, so I'm removing the specific contact information from this entry.

While watching some web access logs recently, I noticed that Internet Explorer was not properly caching images. So for common images shared on all the pages of the server, Internet Explorer was downloading the image over and over again. Firefox was properly caching them, but since the majority of the internet still surfs via IE, this problem was wasting a lot of bandwidth.

After some research, I discovered that this problem was the result of using mod_gzip on the server. mod_gzip is an Apache module that compresses web page data before it is sent to the browser, thereby saving bandwidth. You typically only use it on HTML pages since graphics don't compress well. Even though my mod_gzip instructions were telling it not to compress images, it was still doing something to the HTTP headers of those files (sending a "Vary" entry). It turns out that this was the cause of IE not caching the images. So my savings in HTML page bandwidth was probably spent in image bandwidth.

I found a solution in this discussion, and it seemed to work for me. I added this to my Apache configuration:

<Files ~ "\.(jpg|gif|png)$">
mod_gzip_send_vary Off
</Files>

Now I'll get to see how much bandwidth I can really save with mod_gzip!

Update 2006-05-07: Lately I've been playing around with using PHP to dynamically provide images from a file cache. In that case, to get web caching to work properly, you'll need to disable the mod_gzip_send_vary on the PHP filename that generates your images, as the example above only accounts for image filenames.

Yesterday I got out for some paddling on Lake Greenwood. It was only in the 40s, but the sun was out and there wasn't much breeze, so it turned out to be an enjoyable and comfortable trip. I'm trying to get back in paddling shape for a camping trip this spring.

The water level is typically low this time of year, which I assume is so that people can work on their docks and there's some storage volume in expectation of the spring rains. But this winter the level is about as low as I've seen it. The depth is no problem for a kayak, and it's neat to see areas normally hidden underwater. I'm not too keen on seeing all the tires along the shore that are exposed. They couldn't have fallen off cars in the all the places I've seen them, so I guess people put them there to attract fish, but it really makes the lake look like a trash heap. Lots of birds around including seagulls, ducks, and coots.

I made a loop around "my" part of the lake between the two bridges, something like 3.5 miles. I brought the GPS along and made a map with GPS Visualizer.

Argh, as of today, the recent referer and blog comment spammer has begun spamming the blog "trackback" interface. I got over 20 trackback spams overnight, all poker ads.

The Serendipity authors posted an update to their spam blocker which hopefully will help...I installed it but haven't seen any hits from the spammer in the past hour or so to verify it.

Ann Elisabeth has been monitoring these spammers for a long time now. She also sent me a blocking method which I'll try if the Serendipity update fails.

I'm tempted to write my own blogging software with no support for comments or trackbacks. The number of comments and trackbacks I get is really too small to make this spam blocking worth the effort. I'd probably see a lot less web traffic if I didn't use a mainstream blog software package. I'll put that at the bottom of my to-do list.