Eby’s Mill Road to Supples Bridge Access:
A quiet interlude in between two magnificent movements, this is a very pleasant section of the Maquoketa River that may not feature all the geological bells and whistles that the Pictured Rocks or Canton area segments have, but it has its moments, not to mention plenty of solitude and wonderful wildlife.
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆
Trip Report Date: November 1, 2022
Skill Level: Beginner
Class Difficulty: Quietwater with scarce riffles
Gradient:
≈2′ per mile
Gauge Recorded on this Trip:
Manchester: ht/ft: 3.9 | cfs: 78
Recommended Levels:
This is too low to paddle comfortably. Look for a minimum of 4.2′ | 150 cfs to avoid scraping.
Put-In:
Eby’s Mill Road, Monticello, Iowa
GPS: 42.19803, -91.0566
Take-Out:
Supples Bridge Access off Temple Hill Road, Onslow, Iowa
GPS: 42.18482, -90.9769
Time: Put in at 12:00p. Out at 3:00p.
Total Time: 3h
Miles Paddled: 8.25
Wildlife:
Bald eagles, turkey vultures, hawks, and deer.
Shuttle Information:
8.75 miles by four wheels or two. Most of the roads are paved.
Background:
There was something missing. Actually, so many things were missing – people and presences, holes in my soul not even an ocean of Iowa corn could fill.
In April 2021, I ventured out to the Maquoketa River for the first time and paddled the fourth and final segments recommended in Nate Hoogeveen’s commendable guidebook, Paddling Iowa. A month later, in May, I returned to paddle his third recommended trip (as well as the very first stretch of the river up in Backbone State Park, a trip I somehow lost all my photos from). For someone who has no connection to the fine state of Iowa beyond paddling, someone who lives 150 miles away from the Maquoketa River, I felt personally drawn to it nonetheless. By this time in my life, I’d paddled the sexiest sections of the Upper Iowa and Yellow rivers, but none of the other famed streams in the northeast part of the state – the so-called Driftless Area of Iowa. The Maquoketa called out to me in ways I still can’t explain. The Maquoketa is also surrounded by personal losses that are impossible for me to disassociate.
Without getting too personal, I lost my one and only aunt the night I came back from that initial April junket. (If you understand what John Prine means when he says “that’s where all the love starts” referring to his aunts in his veritable coda of a song, “When I Get to Heaven,” then you’ll have a foundation for what mine meant to me.) A month after the May trips I lost my good friend, Jeff, aka Kayak Guru. (Many of us lost Jeff, not just me.) And a month before this trip in November of 2022 I lost my dog.
As a paddler and as a man on a mission doing endless recon for an eventual guidebook, there was a missing river-verse where our trip in May 2021 ended and where a different one a month earlier had begun. November – the month of all souls and the day of the dead, the first month of the beginning darkness and slowness to a still breath, the hinge of autumn to winter – November seemed like the right time to revisit memories, make additional ones since life does go on, and anoint myself anew.
At least in my first edition copy of his guidebook, Hoogeveen sections out four trips on the Maquoketa River bookmarked by dams – the first beginning below the Lake Delhi dam, the last ending a few miles above the Maquoketa dam, and the one in Monticello separating trips 2 and 3. The first two trips average about 10 miles apiece, the fourth 14 miles and change (with honorable mentions for another 7-10 miles addendum paddling). The third trip is a whopper (or, wait, shouldn’t it be a Big Mac?) at 20 miles. For the OCD-addled audience, there’s an interesting omission of only 3 miles from where his Trip 3 ends and Trip 4 begins. In our May trip in 2021, we declined to take on all 20 miles of his Trip 3, settling instead for 14 miles by ending at Eby’s Mill Road. Lots of numbers, I recognize; I promise this is much easier to follow at home with a map in hand!
Eby’s Mill Road to Highway 136 is about 5.5 miles.
Highway 136 to Temple Hill Road/Supples Access is about 3 miles.
Temple Hill Road/Supples Access to the Canton access is about 6 miles.
Canton to 30th Avenue/Millertown Access is another 6 miles.
30th Avenue/Millertown Access to 50th Avenue/Royertown Access is about 2.5 miles.
50th Avenue/Royertown Access to 82nd Avenue/Chenelworth Access is 2.25 miles.
82nd Avenue/Chenelworth Access to 74th Street/Morehead Access is just shy of 2 miles.
74th Street/Morehead Access to Joinerville Park is 3.5 miles.
Joinerville Park to the next and last dam on the Maquoketa River is about 4.25 miles.
All tallied and told, that’s some 35 miles of very viable paddling with accesses ranging from excellent to barely better than nothing, not to mention another 33 miles from the dam to the Mississippi River (but that’s another story). In other words, it’s about 50 river miles from the Monticello dam to the Maquoketa dam. To be blunt, these are the prettiest, most breathtaking sweeps of the Maquoketa River (some stretches more so than others, of course). And since there are no fewer than 11 accesses in between these two dams, paddlers can cobble together a wide array of trip lengths and environments, depending on their time and druthers.
Please bear in mind that the Maquoketa is a big river by this point, often around 200′ wide. As such, it runs shallow since whatever volume it has is spread thin across its width. The Maquoketa is mostly sand-lined, so scraping isn’t too much of an issue, but there are several gravel-bottomed areas where you can expect to run aground. Also, given its width and that you’re in Iowa, beware of the wind!
Overview:
The access at Eby’s Mill Road (aka Highway X73) is excellent. From our May 2021 trip to this one 18 months later, the formerly scruffy afterthought of a landing got a total makeover. On the big wide river, the surroundings are far from spectacular, but they are supremely pleasant. Only a quarter-mile from the landing, you’ll glide along an attractive rock outcrop wall, about 8-10′ tall, on river-right for a few hundred feet. Alas, this is followed by long straightaways surrounded either by lowland woods or croplands. But rock outcrops, ridges, and bluffs are found pretty frequently – just not at the same scale as the preceding or following river sections. On our trip, we encountered scads of scattered “boneyards” where discarded tree debris was all the more prominent at the low water level of mid-autumn. Again, it seemed fitting for November – particularly right after Halloween, skeletal trees and all…
The views improve as you move northeast, with steep sandy banks easily 30′ high, wooded bluffs, and lots of mum-colored oak trees clutching their brittle leaves, rustling like thin scraps of rusted metal in the breeze. An impressive swath of public land lies along the left bank, the eastern “half” of Eby’s Mill Wildlife Area. For roughly 1.5 miles, wooded bluffs flank both sides of the river in what is arguably the prettiest sweep on this particular trip.
The surroundings subside as you approach the bridge at Highway 136, where there’s a rough but decent access on the upstream side, river-left. At this point, it’s been about 5.5 miles from Eby’s Mill, with 3ish more miles to Temple Hill. Another notable patch of public land, albeit much smaller, lies off to the left as well, called Leifker Wildlife Area, comprising native prairie.
Below the bridge, ragged and haggard sandbanks (30-50′ high) are more dominant than wooded bluffs. Outwash deposits from the receding glaciers of yesteryear, the friggin’ scale and scope of continental glaciation is beyond understanding! SMS out here stands for So Much Sand! Some outcrops and big boulders await as well, but it’s sand in the limelight from here down to Temple Hill Road. In between two horseshoe-shaped loops lies a painfully mundane ¾-mile-long straightaway southeast. Paddlers can likely expect to encounter more obstacle courses from the compound fracture-looking tree debris, but the river is so wide that there ought to be a reasonable way around or through. Just be mindful of the wind.
The access at Temple Hill Road (aka Supples Bridge) is about 300′ downstream from the bridge itself, on river-right. At the time of our trip, the access is nothing like Eby’s Mill, but it’s definitively legit, mostly flat, and mainly sandy.
What we liked:
As far as a paddling destination goes, my expectation for this trip was low. Indeed, the true destination here was simply getting together with a beloved friend and ordering one more round of tasty Maquoketa before the last call of cold weather season approached, limiting the paddling to visiting only local haunts once a month. But this turned out to be terrific fun and even prettier than I’d have thought. And the wildlife was fantastic, too; so many deer and so many bald eagles!
In many ways, paddling in November is a bit like gambling with house money, especially somewhere new. For me (and Scotty), this trip was both new and renewed; we’d both been to each of these accesses before on trips 1.5 years earlier, but coming from and going to different places. So much had changed in between, though the landscape in early November is not vastly different than in early April. “Same ‘Ol river,” as the song goes (though we all know that no river is ever the same river). It’s no coincidence that the words familial and familiar are so closely, well, related. I won’t speak for you, but rivers are definitely part of my family – even those relatives once or twice removed in Iowa.
Speaking of songs (yes, yet another!), Scotty won the day with downloading “Jump” by the let’s-carbon date-us-by-referencing Kriss Kross from the early 1990s, legendary teenage rappers Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac – since we were paddling the Maquoketa – with which he surprised me by playing midway into our trip, hat cocked sideways ‘cause we’s grown-ass men.
If you’re anything like me – and for several reasons (your own sake not least among them) I hope you’re not – then you’ll understand the delight in “bookending” river trips. The satisfaction is not merely connecting the dots and missing links; that’s a mental thing, aka a symptom of being OCD about paddling all practical river segments. It’s the emotional matter that matters more, recalibrating ourselves and our memories with where we were then to where we are now. Visiting relatively familiar spaces and places with the grace of distance (geography and/or time) allows for this kind of internal audit. For me, it’s a kind of therapy and spirituality. Rivers are divine portals for remembrance and memorials. And what month is better for memorials than November?
That’s right folks, we here at Miles Paddled like to link the sacred and profane just as much as we do individual river trip segments. Where else will you find references to John Prine and Kris Kross in the same post?
What we didn’t like:
Allow me to kvetch. But before so, do understand that what I am about to kvetch about was purely circumstantial on this one given day and something no other paddler will probably ever contend with.
At the time of our trip, the dedicated landing at Eby’s Mill Road was under reconstruction. In other words, the access wasn’t accessible. Instead, we had to rough it from the road shoulder to the water and give a one-finger wave to the workers grading the actual access as we passed. Is it ha-ha funny or WTF-funny that two guys looking to use the access at Eby’s Mill Road to paddle the Maquoketa River could not do so because the access at Eby’s Mill Road to paddle the Maquoketa River was closed off by a construction crew with all their heavy duty equipment to improve it. Don’t get me wrong – I get it. But the irony was not lost on us. And the bush-whacking we endured to commando-launch from the banks sucked. But again, this was a one-time/ bad timing thing. The access today is practically state of the art with valet parking!
The main thing we didn’t like was the low water level – Scotty especially, as he sat lower in his kayak than I in my canoe. This was a major mea culpa on my part, as I checked the wrong gauge before we set out for this trip. I looked up the gauge in Maquoketa, not Manchester. There was plenty of water in Maquoketa, because at that point the North Fork feeds the mainstream, but that’s well downstream from where we were. To run this trip, this section of the Maquoketa, be sure to check the Manchester USGS gauge, upstream from here, and that there’s at least 4.2’ or around 150 cfs.
To be fair, there’s a lot of scrub and scruff along the banks in this section; it’s not blessed with the geological bling or zippy current found elsewhere. Don’t let this be your first sip of the Maquoketa, but do include it in your order of flights!
If we did this trip again:
I’d definitely do this trip again, but only with more water. That said, I’d be inclined to alter things and not recap this trip as-was. As such, there are a few different options:
Option 1: Starting at the Pictured Rocks access and taking out either at Highway 136 for about 12 miles or at Temple Hill Road for 15 miles.
Option 2: Add six miles to this trip by taking out at the next access down, in Canton for a total of 14.5 miles.
Option 3: Begin at Highway 136 and take out in Canton for 9ish miles.
***************
Related Information:
Maquoketa River I: Quaker Mill Dam to Bailey’s Ford Park
Maquoketa River II: Delhi to Hopkinton
Maquoketa River III: Monticello to Eby’s Mill Road
General: Jones County Conservation
General: Jones County Driftless Area highlights
Guide: Paddling Iowa by Nate Hoogeveen
Guide + Map: Northeast Iowa Resource Conservation & Development
Outfitter: Monticello River Rentals
Wikipedia: Maquoketa River
Miles Paddled/Driftless Kayaker Video:
Photo Gallery:
No Comments