We won the Ice House Getaway in the River Alliance Auction. Actually, we were outbid at the very last second of furious bidding, but the Alliance director Denny Caneff got permission from owners Frank and Marianna Weinhold to allow two winners that year. The Weinholds let us invite a few well-behaved women paddlers to land at their private beach on Louis Bluff.
Flow at gauge 0540400 WI River near WI Dells: 6500 cfs (median for this date ~4000). 7 days earlier when we had picked up the key and checked out the beach, the flow was 26000 cfs! The beach was submerged that day, but there was a sliver of sand for us to land on a week later. Marianna told us that the water had been so high for a gathering they had hosted a few weeks earlier that they actually paddled the boats into the woods to land.
A group of 7 boats put in at the beautiful Two Rivers public landing at the mouth of the Lemonweir River. We paddled around a spectacular bluff into the Wisconsin River and floated to Louis Bluff on a perfect sunny afternoon after a vicious storm the previous night. The trip was about 5 miles and took about 2.5 hours. At the end, some of us paddled around in the sloughs at the north end of the bluff. We had a pitch-in picnic in the gazebo and some of us climbed the bluff to the south lookout afterward.
