Commuting Along the Charles River

Brian Mardirosian used his red kayak to commute using the Charles River, traveling from West Roxbury to Beacon Hill. Mardirosian started out on the Charles River at 5:30 a.m. on June 26 near Marie Louise Kehoe Park and Bridge Street and he arrived at work at around 11 a.m.

He documented the journey with a waterproof camera, which automatically took pictures every 30 seconds. He mashed those stills together to create the video below.

You will see the Hemlock Gorge paddling trip portion of the route starting at 1:30, Echo Bridge at 2:00 and ending in Newton Lower Falls at 3:00. Someday I will paddle the rest of the Charles River.

From the story: West Roxbury man kayaks to work on the Charles River by Carol Lawless for Wicked Local Roslindale

Postcards of the Charles River from the Boston Public Library

The Boston Public Library has posted a collection of Newton post cards using Flickr. Several of the pictures show how the Charles River used to look in its run through Newton.

This looks like the dam at Upper Falls (the Silk Mill Dam):

You can compare this to my recent picture of the dam at Upper Falls from my paddling trip through Hemlock Gorge:

It was interesting to see what the area around Horseshoe Dam looked like prior to the construction of Route 9, as seen in this picture:

Newton And The Charles River

The Boston Globe West has a story from the Newton History Museum at The Jackson Homestead focusing on the impact of the Charles River on Newton: Pages From Newton’s History.

The City of Newton is defined by the Charles. It has the river on its borders in the south, west, and north, and it was on the river’s banks that the city got its start — not as one unified town, but at first as a string of villages that grew up along the watercourse that provided abundant power for mills and manufacturing effots. Improved transportation — first roads, then rail — gave those factories better access to markets. It also tied together the villages of Newton and brought the 18 square miles of farms and woods bounded by the Charles into a closer relationship with the metropolis at its doorstep, Boston.

. . .

The Charles today is slow and civilized, tamed by dams that have turned it into a series of elongated, picturesque lakes that make the river a marvelous resource for recreation and natural beauty. The original purpose of those dams was almost the opposite. They made the Charles a very hard-working river.

Massachusetts Oyster Project

From the Boston Globe’s Green Blog: Oysters help clean the Charles River.

Oysters eat silt, in addition to the phytoplankton that drift in the currents. As they eat, they also ingest some of the bacteria and organic compounds contained in sewer overflow, which Jay said runs untreated into the Charles from houses and streets during heavy rains.

So the Massachusetts Oyster Project dropped 150,000 oysters into the Charles River Basin around Constitution Marina this past weekend.

Oysters may be able to offset point pollution sources such as partially treated sewage coming out from Combined Sewage Overflows (CSOs). The number, flow, and impact of these has been reduced dramatically by the work of the MWRA and the cleanup of Boston Harbor. But it will be difficult to totally eliminate CSOs entirely.

CRWA Annual Meeting

The Charles River Watershed Association is having their annual meeting and awards dinner on November 19, 2008 at the Newton Marriot Hotel (along the banks of the Charles).

The featured speaker will be Dr. Sarah Slaughter, coordinator of the MIT Sloan School of Management Sustainability Business Laboratory and the Sloan Sustainability Initiative, who will present on Designing Sustainable and Resilient Communities. Dr. Slaughter will discuss how innovations in engineering can change the way cities conserve vital water resources and withstand disasters.

Bellingham Meadows

The Bellingham Meadows are part of the Natural Valley Storage Project. The Army Corps of Engineers uses stategic areas of wetlands along the Charles River to slow the progress of flood waters headed to Boston. Sensibly, the Army Corp recognized the ability of wetlands to hold back flood waters and have preserved 7800 wetland acres along the river. Bellingham Meadows is Area S of the Natural Valley Storage Project. I paddled through Area G of the project in the Stop River Confluence trip on the river.

For those of you who have only seen the Charles River lying between Cambridge and Boston, you would not recognize the river in the Bellingham Meadows, closer to the headwaters. At times the river was as narrow as the length of paddle. In several places it was even narrower. It started off as as a very peaceful and pleasant. It was a bit colder than it was earlier in the week.

I ran into the spookiest part of the entire river when I got to the Interstate 495 bridge.

1-495 Tunnel / Conduit

You can in the picture see that the bridge is very low over the water. At the water level that day, I just barely fit under the bridge. I paddled for a few hundred yards in pitch darkness as the roof of the tunnel got lower and lower. By then end of the tunnel I had to duck down in the kayak to fit through. It is not just the parallax effect in the picture, the opening at the far end of the tunnel is about two feet shorter than the opening at the entrance.

The tunnel is intentionally low as part of the Natural Valley Storage Project flood control. The I-495 bridge acts as a culvert restricting the flow of the river. During times of high water, it acts as a dam limiting the flow of water downstream and backing the water into the Bellingham Meadows.

Downstream from the I-495 bridge the Bellingham Meadows gradually give way to uplands. Throughout the Bellingham meadows the river zigs-zags back and forth with sharp S-turns. High Street in Bellingham is actually a causeway across the meadows with a narrow bridge allowing the river to pass through.

Eventually the river reaches the North Bellingham Dam. That is where the day went downhill.

The North Bellingham Dam is a low structure that is crumbling and in disrepair. Downstream from the dam, the river is low, swift and rocky. There are also a few short ledge drop offs.

North Bellingham Dam

After my swimming experience at the Cordingly Dam during my trip on the Hemlock Gorge section of the river, I was very tentative about paddling through rocky swiftwater. I portaged the kayak about 100 yards from the dam to Maple Street. There is a large industrial building on the far side of Maple Street. I walked along the parking lot scouting for a place to get back in the river. The rocky fast water continued for several hundred more yards. This was a bad omen. Then the foliage between the parking lot and the river grew impenetrable. this was a bad omen. The other side of the river was wooded put looked passable so I portaged the kayak for half a mile through the woods, vines and thorns along the river bank. It was nasty hike. I should have noticed the lack of portage route as a bad omen.

I should have taken all of these omens to heart and not continued. I ignored the omens. I was halfway between my bike and the truck in an unfamiliar section of Massachusetts. I thought it would be better to continue downstream than to turn around and back upstream.

I thought wrong.

The section of the river downstream from the North Bellingham Dam is a miserable stretch of the river. It is narrow and over grown. It is full of debris and fallen branches. It is rocky and shallow. It is barely passable. I spent as much time using my hands to push the kayak off obstacles as I did using the paddle. I needed a saw more than I needed a paddle. At one point there was picnic table blocking the river. The only redeeming thing was the sudden appearance and disappearance of an eight point buck along the river.

Caryville Dam

I was happy to finally come to the small pond at the Caryville Dam. Even the takeout was miserable. The sides of the pond were overgrown and impenetrable. The only way out that I could find was a climb up a three foot high concrete wall next the dam. That means I had to pull myself and the kayak three feet straight up. Across the street from the dam is an abandoned factory. An ominous end to my week.

Caryville Factory

Elm Bank and the Bays Region of the Charles River

It was another beautifully warm and sunny October day, so I went back to the Charles River. I put in just downstream from the South Natick Dam.

South Natick Dam

A little way downstream, I came across the beautiful Cheney Bridge spanning the river.

Cheney Bridge to Elm Bank

The Cheney bridge provides access to Elm Bank, a state-owned property with two miles of frontage on the river. The 182 acres of woodlands, fields, and old estate property is surrounded on three sides by the Charles River. Elm Bank was given its name in 1740, when Colonel John Jones acquired the land and planted elms along the banks of the Charles River. The site was later occupied by the Loring, Broad, and Otis families before being sold in 1874 to Benjamin Pierce Cheney. At the time of Cheney’s death in 1895, the property contained over 200 acres (80 hectares), and passed to his eldest daughter Alice in 1905. In 1907, Alice and her husband, Dr. William Hewson Baltzell, engaged an architectural firm to build a neo-Georgian manor house, and the most prominent landscapers of the day, the Olmsted Brothers, were hired to design and improve the gardens.  The entire site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 and is currently owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and leased to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Waban Arches

When I came to the confluence with Waban Brook, I paddled upstream to the Waban Arches. These support the Sudbury Aqueduct which carried water from a reservoir in Framingham to Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston.

The Bays Region Stretches three miles from Charles River Street to the Cochrane Dam. These backwaters are abandoned channels formed as the river changed course as it flooded and re-formed in the flat-bottomed valley between Needham and Dover. The river is broad and flat through this section, meandering back and forth. There were numerous bays to duck into.

I ran into a few swans and a blue heron grazing in the marshy sides of the river.

Also along this stretch of the river was a diverse assortment of houses. There were simple houses and there were mansions, and everything in between. In particular, there was a striking contemporary with floor to ceiling walls of windows in every room.

A common theme for all the houses was their connection to the river. Almost every house had steps down to the river and many had boats visible in their yard.

The section of the river ended at the Cochrane Dam. Then I had a bike ride up the beautiful Claybrook Road through Dover to fetch the truck.

Cochrane Dam