Welch to Highway 61:
A languorous segment of the Cannon River featuring stately bluffs, occasional rock outcrops, and a sizeable stretch of public land and little development, there’s a lot to like about this short trip. There’s also a lot of trash snagged on a lot of deadfall, not to mention a $5 per boat fee at the put-in and a steep, muddy access at the takeout. Bicyclists will enjoy a dedicated trail that parallels the river for an excellent shuttle.
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Trip Report Date: October 24, 2023
Skill Level: Beginner
Class Difficulty: Riffles
Gradient:
3.75′ per mile
Gauge Recorded on this Trip:
Welch: ht/ft: 3.3 | cfs: 255
Recommended Levels:
This is the lowest recommended level. Another great resource for correlating water levels is Minnesota’s DNR Water Level page. The data is different but much more user-friendly. 300-1,540 cfs are “Medium” levels. 300-700 cfs is ideal.
Put-In:
Welch Mill Canoeing, Tubing & Kayaking, off County 7 Boulevard, Welch, Minnesota
GPS: 44.56775, -92.73897
Take-Out:
Cannon River public access, Highway 61, Red Wing, Minnesota
GPS: 44.58098, -92.65467
Time: Put in at 9:00a. Out at 11:30a.
Total Time: 2h 30m
Miles Paddled: 7
Wildlife:
Bald eagles, great blue herons, starlings, geese, ducks, mussels, turtle tracks and raccoon paw prints, but zero turtles or raccoons.
Shuttle Information:
5.75 miles by road. From the takeout, go north and west along Highway 61 to Welch Short Cut (that’s actually the name of the road!). If you miss it (there’s a sign that says “Welch” and an arrow pointing the way), then add a few miles by taking Highway 61 west to Highway 7 south.
The bicycle option is more scenic and maverick. It’s about 6.5 miles and does require riding on the shoulder of Highway 61 south for half a mile and then going rogue to connect to the Cannon Valley Trail that runs beneath the highway. This requires lifting your bike over the guardrail and bush-whacking down to the bottoms via the path of least resistance to find the trail. It sounds dodgy, but it’s totally doable – and from the feint path that can be seen, it’s definitely been done by others. Alternatively, stay on Highway 61 for another half-mile, turn left onto Cannon Bottom Road, which then connects to the trail. It’s less commando, of course, but does necessitate riding in the shoulder more and then crossing over the highway. Turn left (west) and stay on the trail to Highway 7 in Welch. There is a $7 day use fee for this, FYI. But it’s a nice trail that offers a fun shuttle alternative to the road.
Background:
So there we were, in Red Wing, Minnesota, having just paddled the 12-ish miles from Cannon Falls to Welch the day before but then saddled with an ominous forecast of 2″ rain in the next 24 hours. Well, shoot. It’s hard to hedge against that kind of prediction. It’s not even a question of will it only be sporadic sprinkles? Or rain for only an hour or so and then just be overcast? A forecast like this is the Wayne Larrivee dagger. It’s not a question of if, but when, for how long, and how much. (Yes, I am making a Packers’ reference while in Vikings’ country, thank you very much. Besides, the dagger hardly got unsheathed this season, so let’s all just chill.) But we hadn’t driven up 3.5 miles from Madison for a combination autumn vacation/R&D for a new guidebook to stay holed up in an Airbnb to read, binge-watch The Crown, cook food, and get drunk – at least not during daylight.
So, we took a calculated risk instead and woke up early to hit the ground running. The hourly forecast consistently predicted that the rain would start around 1pm. So, a quick 7-mile paddle followed by about the same distance bike shuttle back to the car, drive to the take-out and strap up the boats – surely we could accomplish all that before 1 pm, right? Right. ‘Cept that the gods did what gods do when we vain humans make plans: chuckle and then kick our butts. In another words, the rain came two hours early. Ask me how fast an open canoe fills with water during a torrential downpour…
As one does while contemplating some float time on the clear blue and/or cloudy waters of our next door neighbor to the west, we relied on the expert and experiential advice of Lynne and Robert Diebel in their excellent guidebook, Paddling Southern Minnesota. From the confluence of the Straight River in Faribault to its mouth at the mighty Mississippi at Red Wing, they lay out four individual segments along the Cannon River. While these trips are contiguous, their distances are ambitious for today’s harried and hurried paddler micromanaging and macro-tasking errands, email, chores, and too many sundry things to list here.
A case in point is their Cannon River 3 trip, which begins in Cannon Falls and concludes at a wayside access off Highway 61 near Red Wing – a distance of 19ish miles. To be sure, this stretch can be shortened by one of two accesses: at Miesville Ravine County Park (7 miles) or the tiny hamlet of Welch (~12 miles) which you will need to ask permission to use while relieving your wallet of the nominal but annoying fee. In 2019, Barry did the latter and had a marvelous time. So for the rain-in-mind reasons mentioned above as well as wanting to complete Welsh to Highway 61, we kept it simple at a 7-mile morning paddle.
The Diebels attend scant detail on these seven miles. To wit, “The gradient now decreases and huge piles of dead trees accumulate at bends. Especially at high water, these snags are frequent and dangerous. Sandbars are habitat to the protected wood turtle, so please don’t disturb any turtles you see.” That’s basically it. Granted, a terse summary has more to do with a publisher’s allowance for word count and page space than an author’s druthers for description. A paddling blog has the advantage of nearly unlimited space, as we’re bound by no binder. Indeed, we can indulge in, as Spaniards say, a luxury of details. This may not be always welcome or warranted by you, dear reader, who might wish that we’d just as soon get on with the trip and leave the personal sh*t aside. To which, hat in hand and with all the humility due me, I’d tactfully point out that it’s a free website and also free of annoying pop-up messages asking you to buy or subscribe. Indeed, the only cost is a couple bad dad jokes, dumb puns, and somewhat questionable references to sports, politics, music, and literature. Like the camera company by the same name of this river, we may not always nail it in “delighting you always,” but we do try to be fun and informative.
Overview:
The Welch access is unmistakably located on the upstream side of the Highway 7 bridge, river-left. It is decidedly private, run by the local outfitter (who likewise has staked every cardinal corner of the bridge as private property, thus rendering access via the public highway infrastructure as a proprietary affair and requiring paddlers to use their landing, which will cost $5 per boat). Fortunately, the view from this access is about as pretty as any paddler could hope for, framed by a towering bluff, frisky riffles by the bridge where there used to be a mill, and a large island braiding the river in two babbling strands.
For the first three miles the Cannon flows mainly in long straightaways, with only a couple little jogs left or right. On the left, the display of big bluffs begins immediately, many of them quietly lording directly over the river. Several of these reveal outcrops from their craggy edifices. Half a mile down from the landing on the right lie views of a skiing hill and its surreal-when-off-season lifts. Like comparable operations at Sundown in Iowa or Cascade in Wisconsin, it’s basically a treeless hill; but it’s still kind of neat to see while paddling. After an unusual horseshoe-shaped bend that funnels the current into lively riffles, the surrounding landscape hems in more intimately. You’re never far from farms, but seeing one is another story. Soon, trees envelop both banks while bluffs stagger continuously downriver.
Little Belle Creek sneaks its way on the right before the Cannon makes a big bend to the left and begins to meander in earnest like a coiled rope – a deviation from its broad boulevard stature heretofore. While this makes the paddling more engaging, it also means that garbage gets trapped along the sinuous banks and downed tree snags. This entirely preventable travesty is tragically juxtaposed with the Cannon River Turtle Preserve, a state natural area that serves to protect turtles, of course, but also offer refuge to songbirds. At 5ish miles, it’s a large swath of public lands, but do keep in mind that all of the sandbars here (of which there are many!) are closed from May 1 to October 15. We saw several turtle trails in the sandbars – as well as raccoon tracks…
A lovely wooded ridge rises above the river on the left, up close and center. The Cannon continues to meander, and collections of tree pileups lie like highway accident pile-ups. Even at its narrowest pinch points, however, the river is a good 100′ wide, so evading the snags should pose no difficulty for paddlers with basic boat control. A less dramatic ridge appears on the right as well as a discernible view of the Cannon Valley Trail. The takeout is less than a mile away. One last gentle meander precedes a straightaway. There’s technically a side channel on the right that will reconnect with the mainstream an astonishing 2.5 miles downriver – meaning the river wraps around an enormous island here. This channel will often be too low to paddle, to say nothing of its obstructions. Needless to say, to reach the Highway 61 access, you’ll want to stay on the main channel.
You’ll pass under power lines and a stately house atop the brow of a big hill. One final flush of riffles awaits before the river slows down considerably and flows straight ahead until you see the bridge at Highway 61. Located upstream of the bridge on river-left, the Diebels describe the landing here as “eroded, overgrown, and hard to find.” Respectfully, I suspect that things have changed since they scribed their manuscript. The path from the water to the parking area is steep and a little muddy, but we’ve endured much worse. There are no facilities – or trash cans (at least this late in the season) – but there’s a ton of room here for multiple vehicles and/or trailers.
What we liked:
Having done the Cannon Falls to Welch segment the day before (which has a more hardscrabble and outcrops-exposed feel) and then the Highway 63 to Red Wing segment the next day (which is soft bluffs and soggy backwaters), I can attest that this trip is uniquely transitional, a hinge between upstream and downriver. Based on the guidebook’s scant description of this section together with its admonishments and the imminent downpour we knew we’d likely encounter, there was an unfortunate and undeserving pall cast on this trip before we so much as launched our boats at Welch. And so the remarkable beauty of the steep bluffs, miles of public land, pretty sandbars, and wooded ravines surprised us.
Before the rains came – and when they did, they were torrential – ethereal wisps of fog curled around select bluffs like silky, slinking scarves. To be sure, this was a unique occurrence given the temperature differentials between the water and air, not to mention the atmospheric dampness, but it added a wild effect to our trip. And thanks to the windless stillness, the lighting made for remarkable photography (and by “photography” I merely mean a schmuck with a very basic digital camera – coincidentally, a Canon). But the soggy, foggy landscape full of lugubrious blues and droopy boughs just beckoned to capture it as fallibly as possible.
What we didn’t like:
In a word, the trash. (Is that two words?) Look, we’re no strangers to trash trapped in strainers along popular paddling routes. From the sandbars of the lower Wisconsin to the bluffs of the Upper Iowa, the banks of the Maquoketa to the cliffs of the Kickapoo, and all the littered letters between Apple and Zumbro – we’ve seen the inexcusable barrage of garbage: flip-flops, crocs, coolers, punctured rubber tubes, mildew-strewn PFDs, broken paddles, soccer balls, basketballs, footballs, beach balls, tennis balls, Frisbees, Styrofoam cups, straws, plastic bottles and plastic bags, plastic from live bait containers and plastic from chewing tobacco, hats, t-shirts, and enough aluminum from cans of cheap beer, Twisted T, White Claw, and Monster-Rockstar-Whatever energy caffeine to outfit a fleet of Airstream trailers. But the Cannon past the popular takeout at Welch looks like a trifecta of flood, tornado, and hurricane hit its shores.
In retrospect, it’s a perfect, um, storm: the stretch of the Cannon leading to Welch is the most popular and prone to partygoers, while the river downstream from Welch is where the tremendous collection of dead trees and their tenacious snags congregate. In other words, if Welch is where most people get off the river, then there’s little incentive for the local outfitter there to clean up the poor river below Welch of the inevitable but avoidable consequences of irresponsible paddlers and tubers. (It’s also worth mentioning that the Twin Cities, with a combined population (counting suburbs) of roughly 4 million people, is only 45 minutes away.) We filled up two huge garbage bags of miscellaneous crap without going out of our way to collect it and eventually having to just let it go because we could’ve spent the whole day gathering it – and we were trying to hot-foot it to avoid getting poured on.
Unlike Barry, I did not have a sanguine attitude towards the Welch Mill operation. Considering that there’s only one bridge in the 19 miles of Cannon River between Cannon Falls and Highway 61 – this being the one in Welch – and that all four corners of said bridge are festooned with PRIVATE PROPERTY/NO TRESPASSING signs, the fact that there’s a $5 per boat (not vehicle) to use the Welch Mill access is, in my opinion, literal highway robbery. At least give paddlers a choice, say an awesome access for $5 a mere mud-free steps away from vehicle parking or a crappy but free access 50 yards away. Otherwise, this feels like a shakedown. Sure, it’s only $5, but still.
Add to that the $7 day use fee for the Cannon Valley Trail, suddenly it’s cost $24 for two to paddle and pedal. For some folks, that’s an unacceptable prix fixe – particularly for something that is/should be typically free. Worth it? Yeeeeah, I guess, but also still worth grumbling about.
If we did this trip again:
I’d definitely do this segment of the Cannon again – it’s really pretty – but I’d blow past Welch by starting at the Miesville Ravine County Park access about 5 miles upstream and thereby make this a 12ish-mile paddle. I feel obliged to point out, however, that such an alternative trip forfeits use of the Cannon Valley Trail, as the two are on opposite banks of the river and there’s no bridge. But you’d save yourself $12 per person and could stop off for a great meal at The Bleu Dog Café in Welch.
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Related Information:
Cannon River I: Faribault to Dundas
Cannon River II: Cannon Falls to Welch
Cannon River IV: Highway 61 to Bay Point Park
Camp: Lake Byllesby Campground
General: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
Guide: Paddling Southern Minnesota
Wikipedia: Cannon River
Photo Gallery:
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