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National Park to Open Up River to Paddlers
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: June 22, 2015
“This is where they walked
This is where they swam
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir
Cuyahoga….”
R.E.M.
Visitors can’t drink the water out of the Cuyahoga River, at least not in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP), but the natural beauty of the river may soon be open to kayaks and canoes, said Lisa Petit, chief of resource management for the park.
CVNP is approximately 33,000 acres of restored wilderness. About 22 miles of the 100-mile long Cuyahoga River runs through the park, according to the park’s website.
The paddling project is a joint effort of both the park and Kent State University’s Department of Recreational Services. That department has a section devoted to outdoor adventuring, which includes kayaking and canoeing on the Cuyahoga near the university.
The department also runs numerous on-and-off campus programs, from team building adventure programs to the ice arena.
“The park has a very good relationship with Kent State University,” said Petit, who has a doctorate in biology from the University of Arkansas and who came to the park from the Smithsonian as a biologist in 2000.
Christopher John acted as the primary contact between Kent State and the park, as assistant director of recreational services for the university, with particular responsibility for the department’s adventure center.
John said, “we are always available to the park for consultations.”
After noting that the two institutions share the same river, Petit said that, “we are connected by the river and in so many other ways. We have a formal relationship to work together for mutual educational and preservation projects on the river,” she said, “to help increase the development of the students, and for the park to engage that student community in training for park management, and they help us with managing park resources. The river is a lab for all kinds of things. It is a natural connection.”
Like the park, the university works to, “help create recreational opportunities on the river,” she said. “We wanted to create a recreational river within the boundaries of the park, but we didn’t know how.”
Enter Kent State. “The park told us that that they wanted to open up the river , but they were not quite sure how to do it. We did some observations on the river, and gave them a report on hazards and opportunities on two stretches of the river in the park.”
John said that the two stretches of river are from Peninsula to Boston (about two miles), and from Boston Mills to Brecksville (about five miles).
Although paddling is not restricted on the river, it is not recommended, said Petit, with two primary problems coming from water quality and the two dams in Peninsula and Brecksville.
Those two dams are under study, said Petit, although no one yet knows if they will stay or go. All of the dams that had been in the river outside of the park have been torn down in the last few years, other than the Gorge dam, which remains, and which covers the original Cuyahoga Falls.
The water itself is still an iffy proposition, she said.
“The water is of a good enough quality to paddle the river about a fourth to a third of the time,” she said. There are also basic routing practicalities to work out.
Before the park opens the river officially to paddlers, a number of tests will have to be taken.
“We are starting small,” she said. “Our relationship with Kent State has propelled us much faster than we could have gone by ourselves.”
The first phase of the project will be a summer-long feasibility study to test the capacity of the river to accommodate paddlers, both through testing the water quality, and through having a few test runs.
Those groups will be small and will be composed primarily of park personnel, she said, with a few groups from KSU. They will not yet be open to the public, at least not in 2015, although Petit did say that there may be one public paddling group among the testing population. If so, that would be offered through the park’s environmental education center, she said.
This program, “is a big step for us,” said Petit. “We are just excited about positively moving forward in a big way toward paddling on the river.”
John said that the university will be providing initial training to to some rangers and other staff, including kayaking training. And then, hopefully next year, the river will be open to the public for paddling.
So maybe, “you can’t drink out of the Cuyahoga,” said Petit. “But that is true of most of the rivers and streams in northeast Ohio. But you can paddle safely through much of the river, and we want to encourage that.”