Brazos River from Hidalgo Falls to Highway 290
Mark Andrus -Thanksgiving 2006

I picked up Jack Richardson in Sugar Land on the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. We found a good buffet restaurant on Highway 36 right before we got to Highway 290 in Brenham. We scouted the 290 bridge between Brenham and Hempstead for the best side to take out on. We decided the west side would be best. We continued on to Hidalgo Falls. We talked with James and Patti of Southwest Paddlesports who agreed to shuttle us. She let me fill up some water bottles I had with water she brought up from Houston. She said the water on the site was probably safe, but the water tasted bad. Anyway, the water faucet on site is from someone else’s well. TRPA is trying now to get donations to drill a well for the paddlers. The well would be probably be drilled deep enough to get good tasting water. After TRPA gets a well, then TRPA will start building a bathroom and shower house. Please consider contributing to TRPA.

We launched around 2:15 pm and paddled for over 3 hours. The first sight we saw was the remains of the locks that had been started before World War I. Work on the locks was stopped during the war and never resumed. The railroad had taken over most transportation by that time and later came trucks. Jack talked about the steamboats on the Brazos; however, most of them could not get that far up the Brazos except in high water. The condition for our trip was low water.

We paddled past the Highway 105 Bridge and Washington on the Brazos State Park. The State Park does not have good access to the river. When we had Hidalgo Falls races, we have to pull the boats up on a rope through a vegetated slope and then wheel the boats on boat carts a couple of hundred yards to the parking lot. Washington on the Brazos was where the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed. We did not consider stopping at the park, because of the lack of access. We found a gravel bar about 8 miles downstream of Hidalgo and about 4 miles past Washington on the Brazos. We started a small driftwood fire and set up camp. Jack made soup and I got out a wine box-Vella Delicious Red which actually was delicious for a box wine. We saw a beaver close up in the water.

We started on the river again the next morning at 8am. After noon, we came on a big sand bar. Over 10 wild pigs were swimming to the upstream end so I suggested we wait until we get to the downstream end for lunch. We stopped for lunch where we had a small grassy slope. We had turkey sandwiches and other snack food. Both of us took a short nap so we were off the river about one hour. Jack found a hoe and a Rouge River paddle along the river. I switched to using the Rouge River paddle since my wooden paddle had got rough and blistered my finger. We decided along the way we would stop whenever we saw the first great camping spot after 4:30.

The first great camping spot on a small gravel bar showed up right at 4:30. We were tired anyway. It seemed deserted until we heard shooting in the distance right after sunset way up above us on the cut bank. We also heard the sounds of wild pigs and coyotes going at each other across the river. All the noise ceased about an hour after sunset. Jack made a mixture of sausage and beans for dinner. We had another driftwood fire.

Jack fixed the leftover sausage and beans as part of breakfast. I declined the beans, since I did not like them the night before and took some oatmeal with the sausage.

We were late getting on the river and only made it by 8:30 in the morning. We saw a large gravel bar and I found several pieces of petrified wood. We stopped for lunch and called James and Patti and told them we were already 2 miles from the bridge.

We reached the bridge at 2 pm, which was about the time James and Patti reached there. They agreed to the same arrangement we had upstream, which was that the money we offered for the shuttle would go to the Hidalgo Falls fund of TRPA. We spent the next hour getting the boats and gear through the mud and the slope at the takeout. His Old Town Discovery 169 was much heavier than my Dagger Reflection 15. Both of us soloed tandem boats because of the weight of camping gear, water etc. We paddled our boats from the stern seat and got the gear as far forward as possible. On the second and third days, I had all of my gear forward of the centerline of the boat. Another thing I noticed was that Gators are great for being in the water because the rubber does not stay wet. However, they are not good for a slope. They kept rolling off my feet when I was getting the boats up the slope. The mud was awful at the takeout because the river must have dropped around 3 feet the previous week. I will have to check the Hempstead gauge readings to be sure since the Hempstead gauge is right at the bridge.

I dropped Jack off in Sugar Land and continued on to Angleton. I went to bed before I got my truck unloaded.