People who have added to our adventures on 9/8/2018: Karen, Jeff, Ken, Travis, Amy, Rosa, Tim, Jim, Rodney, Matt, Corrina, Nicky, Kathy, Anne, and Tiger!
We met 2+ years ago while checking out a quarry. Anya organized a Meetup through the Chicago Hiking and Outdoors group at the time in order to bike and kayak the quarry at Lemont. Since then, we’ve done many such “Mayhem” adventures.
Mayhem: ˈmāˌhem/: noun and verb
- an outing of unknown route and duration, involving physical activity surrounded by nature.
This past Saturday we planned a three rivers adventure with the new group that formed 2 years ago on September 27,2016: HiYak Adventures. Although we’ve paddled the route a year ago and were pretty comfortable with the route, we scouted out the area over Labor day by bike. What we found was that the launch sites and large parts of the Desplaines River was overgrown with huge mutant lily pads! In fact the river looked more like a field, than a flowing body of water. In addition, the I&M canal had a particular “eau” during the hot weather that was only tolerable while breezing by it on bikes. This changed things a bit. Not to be disheartened, we decided to move the launch site to the DuPage River, and consider the mayhem to be part of the lily pad crossing and then see how it goes.
On Saturday, we got up early and drove to the confluence of the rivers. Several people arrived about 45 minutes early and by 10 AM we had almost all 17 who signed up (16 humans and one doggie!). There were people who had inflatable kayaks and some of us with foldable. Once everyone was assembled, Jeff and Anya gave instructions for what to expect on this type of trip. We took a quick picture with the cute sign nearby and were off to paddle!
Here is the route:
