My summer started

[steelslaver]

Summer is here and that means floating the creek!

First days over 90 were yesterday and today so we floated the creek for the first time this year. Big Spring creek starts about 7 miles from town. A 2 mile drive from my house to a spot called the tree farm where there is a nice place to get in. Guy used to have a tree farm there and leaves a spot by the road for people to park by the creek. We first park my Ranger by the Honey Ranch about a 1/4 mile from my house and drive upstream with the truck full of tubes. We have 6 creek tubes that have head rests and mesh bottoms. Today the wife and I, plus the 2 girls and one of their friends went. It is wow cold when you get in but you are able to adjust and enjoy the cool. The creek really meanders and even though it moves pretty good it is about a 1 1/2 hour float Creek probably averages about 30' wide and a couple ft deep. of real clear water. There are some small rapids etc that will make sure you get wet all over. Willows, wild flowers, over hanging trees, trout jumping, ducks and baby ducks, all kinds of birds, have seen beavers deer and mink, and small batches of people swimming in spots along the way. A fly fisherman here and there. Several small springs add to it in places, then your at the spot we take out by a small foot bridge. The last 1/2 the creek has a path the follows it touching here and there, You could keep going and make your way through town and I have heard a few kids now and then float the part about 3 blocks long where it goes under the 2 blocks before Main and comes out a block the other side. One bar has a box with a glass lid you can look down into the creek from. The lid locks on as some enterprising kids floated to a after hours party one summer night.

We try to go a couple times a week when it is hot for a quick cool break during the day.

 

[Marshwheeling]

There are a lot of tubing venues around the Twin Cities.some are quiet and bucolic like your Big Spring Creek. Some are more commercial, and can gat rowdy and raunchy. For about ten years up until the pandemic, I drove a shuttle bus for one of the tubing parks on the Apple River at Somerset, WI.
I took my first tubing trips on the Apple River maybe 65 years ago, at the age of seven or eight. My pop was an alcoholic, and tubing gave him an excuse to drink beer in quiet surroundings without fear of criticism. Bicycling around South Minneapolis from tavern to tavern was another pastime he enjoyed.
I got on the Apple River again in my twenties, around 1970. I think I had fun. I dont have a clear recollection of the day. By the time I started driving a bus, the business had gone through a boom, which morphed into a law enforcement problem, and finally a bust which drove a number of the park operators out of business. There were still four operators, who all made a pile of money during the summer months. I saw a lot of eye-popping sights on my bus, and some whic I can never un-see.
I tubed the river once during the time I ran the buses, free to employees, of course. It had been about forty years since the last time I tubed the river, which struck me as just about right.

 

[arjay]

One of my favorite spots to fish on the lower Poudre is great for that. Once runoff starts the tubers and rafters take over! In the fall,it’s good with a woolly bugger [emoji16]

 

[Rustyt1953]

Sounds like good times. Many years ago I used to go tubing on Deep River in Randolph County, NC.

Mucho fun. Hadn't thought about that in decades till now.

 

[bigmtnman]

Pictures man....PICTURES !!