Maple Paddle

After a few months off from canoe building I have started a new small project to get back into it. The maple paddle is being made from a 7/8" light-coloured maple board with strips of dark mahogony laminated on the shaft and handle to make them at least 1-1/4" thick. I picked up the wood from Minton's hardware in Mountain View, which after more than 100 years in business will be closing soon. While the scrap pieces of Mahogony cost a total of 25 cents, the two 5'-6" maple boards came to $100! (The guy who cut them to length for me asked "Have you checked out how much it costs to just buy a paddle from West Marine??") It sure is beautiful wood though. I was debating whether to get a thicker poplar board that wouldn't have required laminating, but I was sold on the look of the maple. I don't have real measurements from the wood I was looking at, but the Wood Engineering Handbook (see sidebar) has properties for Sugar (hard) Maple and Yellow Poplar.

So, while Maple is 1.50 times heavier than poplar, it has 1.55 times the bending strength. Of course these are only estimates as wood properties can vary from tree to tree and depending on where in the tree the wood came from. The upshot is that I should make the paddle blade relatively thin to reduce weight, but this should not compromise on strength. Unfortunately the shaft cannot be made too thin as it needs to feel comfortable in the hand. Looking at the work to failure for the two woods in the above table, it looks like Maple is considerably tougher.
Because Maple is such a hard wood, it is also difficult to work with hand tools. I found this today as I began planing the paddle blade. I initially had the edge of my block plane ground to 30 degrees, but it had difficulty biting the wood. I reground the edge at 25 degrees and found it much better. The hard Maple requires that I resharpen the plane edge frequently.

Ahjumawi

Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park lies in the Northeast corner of California, about 50 miles East of Redding on Hwy 299. Among its claims are "most remote" and "least visited" state park in California and the "largest system of fresh-water springs" in the country. "Most remote" is relative - it is maybe if you're coming from the Bay Area or SoCal, but certainly not if you live in McArthur, which is 3 miles away. It may be the "least visited", probably because you can only access the campsites by boat, but when we arrived at the launch there were a couple dozen folks bringing in their motorboats after a morning spin on the lakes.The most common description of the park on the internet is "exceptional, even primeval, beauty", which seems to have been copied from the park website. (see side bar)

The primeval beauty didn't strike us at first as we launched from the "Rat Farm" with clouds obscuring views of the peaks, but by the next day I agreed with the description. The lava springs are unique in my experience with cool clear water flowing from the porous lava rock by Ja-she Creek to feed the lakes.
The campsites are relatively close to the launch so, hoping to get in a little more paddling, we headed off downwind to paddle around Big Lake, knowing we'd have to battle to get back. Big Lake wasn't named Huge Lake for a reason, but there is a good hour of paddling to get around it. As if on cue, the breeze picked up and threatened rain as soon as we pointed our bow back upwind. We were rewarded with some great views of Mt. Shasta peaking through the clouds in the distance though. Passing back by the Rat Farm we entered Horr Pond to see that another group had already claimed the first campground. There are actually 3 sites at each campground, but we decided to keep fighting the wind to get a campground all to ourselves.


Being one of the least visited state parks, there is not a lot of information on it to be found and the best map to be found was the simple outline of the lakes that I printed from the park website. Comparing the map to a Google Earth view when we got back home, we found that the map must be quite out-of-date, and for that reason it took us a while to find the Crystal Springs and Ja-she Creek sites. See the comparison above. It appears that a levy holding back the Tule River breached flooding the peninsula between Horr Pond and the river. It actually creates a much larger area to explore by canoe.
We eventually happened upon the Ja-she Creek campsites and set-up there for two nights without seeing any other people for the rest of the weekend. The day after arriving we hiked about 9 miles on the park trails to see the volcanic splatter cones, depressions and lava tubes. Definitely worth the trip!

If you're visiting the park and looking for something to eat on the way in or out check out 'Hal & Kathy's Cook House' in Fall River Mills. It's great! We found it on our drive out after a pack-up and paddle out in the rain.

Burney Falls is worth the side trip.