After eight years of persistent, backbreaking work, the entire navigable length of the North, South and West Chickamauga creeks have been cleared for paddlers thanks to the work of local volunteers logging hundreds of hours on area streams.
“We are all volunteers, and we used our own equipment,” Eric Fleming, 28-year member of the Tennessee Valley Canoe Club and leader of paddlers devoting time to the effort, said Monday in a phone interview.
Fleming said he and others put more than 1,900 hours into the work, and now it’s time to get the word out to fellow paddlers there are newly-cleared water trails and travel.
“We used to just paddle on the Tennessee River, Sale Creek and Soddy Creek – it was just basically flatwater paddling, and the boats were longer and we used to paddle long and fast down through the Tennessee River Gorge,” said Fleming, 72.
Fleming organizes and leads paddling trips for the club, but new technology threw the group a new wave.