Charles River Needham

Another Sunday, another kayak trip. The location this Sunday was also the Charles River. The river is something like 60 miles long and all of it is within 20 miles of my house. This makes for a lot of options for kayaking on it. The launch site for this week was in Needham, near the Wellesley line.

Parking here is limited. There's easy parking for about 4 cars (or two cars and a pickup truck with a boat trailer). After that it gets kind of tricky. I ended up parked just beyond the gravel at the side of the road.


It was another clear blue sky day. That is where the similarities to the previous week's weather ended. This Sunday was chilly, and windy. I suited up in all of my cold weather paddle gear. I should have added a fleece jacket and the full finger gloves instead of the ones without finger tips.

The tree color was more muted this week. It was still very nice to look at and photograph, just without the glow of a week earlier.


This section of the river has more marsh than the section in Natick. Most of the marsh grass has gone to yellows and browns, but every once in a while there was a green clump.

The river winds through the marsh, making the paddled distance much longer than the "as the crow flies" distance.

The wind made the paddle challenging at points. There were a couple of times when I came around a corner and found myself paddling with all my might to keep moving forward.


Not many critter sightings along this stretch. I guess all the smart ones were hunkered down somewhere warm. I did see a couple of swans, and a few turtles.



I love the architecture of dead trees. I have many, many pictures of them. Which doesn't keep me from taking more. Somewhere I have a picture of this tree taken a year and a half ago, on a warm June day.

I have a story to go with the last picture. In fifth grade I was chosen, or won the opportunity - I honestly don't remember which, to decorate a bulletin board in the classroom with a classmate. It must have been in October because Jenny and I decided to create a haunted house scene on the board. I spent hours creating the perfect tree for the haunted house - gnarly and tangled. I had just learned how to draw a tree, including not having to deal with ending the branches by hiding them behind other branches. The one for the bulletin board was cut out of construction paper. This tree reminded me of that one.