Missouri Whitewater Championships: Lagom-Style Family Adventure

The 52nd Annual Missouri Whitewater Championships will be begin this Friday at the Millstream Gardens Conservation Area in Fredericktown, MO.  It looks to be the perfect weekend for some hiking and whitewater action with plenty of sunshine and warm temperatures.  This is the perfect setting for a full day or weekend of family adventure.

Last year, my family and some friends attended the Championships together and I couldn’t have been more satisfied with the experience.  Granted it was pretty cold and a little rainy, but that did not take away from the excitement of the day.

As I already mentioned, the location of the MWC is the Millstream Garden Conservation Area.  Participants start at the pavilion and make their way down the St. Francis river, through the shut-ins (large rocks in the river), to the pull out point a little ways downriver.  But how do they make it into a competition?  Obviously, it’s a timed event based on who can dodge the rocks and get down the river the quickest, but that’s not all.  Competitors also have to go through “gates” or get penalized.

Before I go into our personal experience, let me explain how the Whitewater Championships work…at least what I learned from my experience.  The gates are hung across the river the weekend before.  Basically they are two poles that hang from cables strategically placed along the river.  The object is for the competitors to go through the center of the gates as they are making their way down.  Some gates are set up in a way that competitors actually have to go pass them, and then paddle upstream and go through the gates from the opposite direction.  If they miss a gate, then they must paddle hard to get above it again and go through it correctly.  There are several different divisions from single riders and two person tandems, to those navigating canoes, kayakers, and an open class which included a paddle boarder!!

I’d read that to get premiere “seating” you would want to get there early.  So we got there early, followed the signs for parking and ended up getting “front row seats!”  The “seats” I’m referring to were actually on rocks in the middle of the river, within spitting distance of the competitors!  The boys and I found a nice tall rock that we could easily jump to in the middle of the St. Francis river and watched the participants come down river towards us.  There were people everywhere!  Some were satisfied with hiking down the trail along the river and just sitting in chairs on the bank to watch.  But many you could find perched on the rocks cheering as they went by.  I felt comfortable enough letting the older boys venture around on their own to find different vantage points to watch, but Oakley and I stayed put near the finish line.

I’ve watched competitive whitewater rafting on television for like the Olympics, but most of the time they are going down man made rivers.  Here, you got to experience these men and women battling the natural elements as they tried to maneuver their way down the river towards the finish.  It looked HARD!!  I can tell you from my own personal experience canoeing down little old Black River with my husband, that there’s no way we would have every been able to successfully navigate around all those rocks, let alone go through gates.  My wedding ring is actually on the bottom of the river from when he hit a rock last summer!  We hit hard, I went flailing over, and my ring went flying.  (Insert sad and crying face).

There were several scary moments when those in kayaks actually flipped upside down and had to “roll” back to the surface.  Several times, people ended up having to abandon their vessel because they couldn’t get back over.  I’m not sure that I would handle that type of situation like others had.

If you wanted to explore other areas of the river, there are some very nice hiking trails that continue down river into the Silver Mines area.  (At some point I will add a nice hiking trail review about that area.)

We had an amazing time with our friends and kids that day.  If you have time, it is definitely worth the little trip to go experience this Lagom Adventure.  I don’t know of too many other places in Missouri that you can experience this type of adventure.

Visit the Missouri Whitewater Championships website for more information and schedules.