This is Falls Lake on the Yadkin River, not the State Park northeast of Raleigh. I joined the Land Trust for Central North Carolina for this paddle beginning outside the small town of Badin. A boat launch ramp allows boats to enter the lake not far from town. However, due to its small size, this lake does not see much motorized boat traffic.
Our group of nine slides the kayaks into the water and begins the paddle into the main body of the lake. Once leaving the cove into the main body, we can see the Falls Dam not far away. Below this dam is the much larger Lake Tillery. Morrow Mountain State Park also is beyond the dam. Its property boundary currently ends at the dam but will, some day, include lands to the west of Falls Lake including 2 miles of shoreline. The LTCNC is raising money to purchase this property from Alcoa and then transfer it to the State as part of Morrow Mountain SP. That land also includes the Hardaway Site, where Native Americans made stone tools, dating back 10,000 years.
We briefly stopped at a dry waterfall. The only sizable waterfall in the Uwharries, at 12 feet. I have seen photos of it but today, it looks like any other dry rock cliff. Proceeding toward Badin Dam, it is soon in sight. An impressive looking place. It is situated in a section of the Yadkin River called the Narrows. The topography allows for a dam to be built here with rising land on both sides of the river. When Alcoa built the dam in 1917 it was the largest concrete dam in the world. During its construction, the river was diverted through two tunnels dug in solid rock. Conditions were just right today for us to slip the kayaks through a tight rock maze to the tunnel exits.
We could paddle into the tunnels about 100 yards before they turned left slightly and became dark. From this point we needed headlamps. Our voices echoed off the walls in an inaudible cacophony of noise. We could hear falling water and were able to make out where it was coming from but our lights didn't illuminate the passage enough to make out just what we were looking at.
Exiting from one of the tunnels, above, you can see a rockfall has partially blocked the entrance.
Disappearing into the tunnel
Its dark in here.
You can see the size of these tunnels. They are fairly large and needed to be large enough to divert the entire river during construction of the dam.
After our tunnel adventure, we pulled the boats out along the shore and started a small fire while Mikey read Uwharrie ghost stories.
Our paddle ended well after the sun had set and the sky darkened. We were fortunate to have a nearly full moon tonight. Note the light tube on the front of the boat. We all had green tubes in front, blue tubes in the rear and red ones on our vests in case we went swimming.
