Rivers offer an extraordinary kind of journey in our world of planes and interstates. The to-do list each morning is short: make coffee, break camp, head down river. The day’s decisions are equally simple, but often difficult. Stay the night at this perfect sandbar that we’ve found an hour or two before we were ready to stop, or head down river to get a few more miles in, taking our chances?
Before the trip, I assumed that the Black River was not a place to take chances. Much of its wondrous isolation is due to its inaccessibility, with a floodplain (aka, swamp) that often extends for miles in either direction of its primary channel. For long stretches, the only dry land are the sandbars deposited along the tightest bends. When the water is high, there may be no dry land for hours of paddling.
Black River State Park solves those logistical challenges, providing legal, designated high ground to camp. Whereas private landowners and sheer inaccessibility have inadvertently protected the river for centuries, this new phase of human-river interaction guarantees its conservation into the future.
Even though the park will attract new visitors (some estimates claim as many as 100,000 a year), Whitehead and the OSI team believe that the incredible amount of protected land will outweigh the human impact, even as the park raises the value of existing homes and increases demand for new ones. Between developable stretches, the park guarantees that miles of river will remain relatively unchanged.
Whitehead compares the project to the protection of the ACE Basin, where a combination of the National Wildlife Refuge, state-owned tracts, and conservation easements protect a resource that’s appreciated at a national level. There are no bad days on the Black, and the river’s day is here.
