Moon Chute

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Legend has it that ages and ages ago the Cherokee used to bathe here. And the river gods preferred that if you were washing yourself in the water you knelt down, rather than bending over and exposing your hindquarters (which they thought a mite disrespectful). Anyway, one cold, rainy and overcast day this big Indian brave decided that river gods or not, if he knelt down in that water he was gonna freeze something off. So he bent over. Wouldn't you know it? At that moment the clouds parted and the river gods saw what he was doing, sent a bolt of lightning down that drove his head into the ground and turned him to stone. If you look downstream, to the right of the camel shaped rock, you can see what remains of him sticking up in the air.

You may have to look at the large version of the picture to see it.

Ms. Be of Ocoee Outdoors tells a story about the rock immediately downstream of that one, but I'll leave that for her.

Running this one is easy. Float gently down the eddy line towards the Camel rock and power forward into the eddy behind it. In a raft at this point it helps to spin the boat. After passing the Moon rock, power forward through the great hard boat surfing/360 wave, and start looking at the last ledge.

If you've got good maneuvering, to the left of that last rock sticking up is a smoother run if you use the eddy right above it to make the ferry, but risks an embarassing pin. On river right of it, be aware of a couple of sticky rocks in the ledge and the two rocks below it which will stick your boat fairly hard.

Hard boaters or at high water levels, cheat far left.

Squirt boaters take note of the wave after the rapid to the left opposite the beach, a good eddy line to play in and at high levels a great place to surf a surface boat as well.

previous : Slice-n-Dice next : Double Suck

I love to hear from my readers, but I get a lot of mail. If you're writing to set up a rafting or other outdoor adventure trip in the southeast Tennessee area, contact the folks at OAR , my favorite outfitters.

This is a part of the Virtual Ocoee pages of Dan's Whitewater collection in the home pages of Dan Lyke , reachable at danlyke@flutterby.com