Texas has long been the leading U.S. state for flood damage, hence the Stevie Ray Vaughan song “It’s Flooding Down in Texas.” The Guadalupe is not a large river, normally no more than about 25 yards wide from dense cypress-lined shore to shore and normally plodding along at 500 to 2,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), or even lower in drought years.
In the mid- and late 1970s, I often paddled the Guadalupe with fellow University of Texas at Austin students in old surplus Grumman canoes. Our favorite stretch was a 17-mile run with a few Class II rapids and one Class III (Hueco Falls). On one trip, I don’t recall if we missed the weather warnings (before our current era of multimedia saturation, if you missed the TV news at 6 and 10, or didn’t read the daily newspaper, you were in the dark) or if we discounted them in our youthful eagerness to get out of Austin and have some fun despite the probable rain.
We had not been on the river long when the sky erupted in a torrential downpour — a hard, pelting “frog floater” with lightning cracks and rapidly rising water. The Class II rapids were washed out but the splash and driving rain were flooding the canoes, making them impossible to maneuver. We couldn’t bail fast enough and soon flipped. The current was so strong that we couldn’t swim the boats to the washed out “shores.” So we just hung on to the upside-down canoes in our PFDs, floating fast along with the increasing tree debris. Twice we managed to find an eddy and bail out, resumed paddling and then flipped again. That’s how we spent most of the trip — floating like flotsam — until the take out, requiring a hard eddy turn before a low-water bridge, difficult enough in normal conditions. The tunnels in low-water crossings are potential death traps, often filled with tree debris forming a weir that will trap and drown people. With a water-logged canoe and the swift current, we couldn’t make the turn — both of us leapt out of my canoe on top of the low-water dam as the empty canoe floated through beneath us. (Our partner’s canoe snagged some trees before the bridge.) I don’t recall the exact max flow that day, but I’m sure it was under 10,000 cfs. We considered this a once-in-a-lifetime “Deliverance” trip.