Paddling in Louisiana

Louisiana is a swamp and bayou state — a liquid network of cypress-lined slow water, coastal marsh, and oxbow lakes where paddling isn't a sport bolted onto the landscape so much as the oldest way of moving through it.

The pirogue is the official state boat for a reason.

Whitewater is essentially absent; what the state has instead is something harder to find elsewhere in the country: nearly a million acres of working river swamp in the Atchafalaya Basin, and a paddling culture that grew up inside it.

The Atchafalaya is the anchor, and it behaves seasonally — back channels close out in low water and run hard in high water when the Basin Floodway is diverting flow, so the LSU geological survey map and some Google Earth ground-truthing matter more than a GPS track.

Henderson Lake out of Kern's Landing is the easiest way in; from there the scene fans out to Indian Bayou's Corps land, the color-coded trails at Lake Fausse Pointe, and Lake Martin near Lafayette, where first light under the flooded cypress is genuinely one of the best bird paddles in the South.

East of the basin, the Bayou Teche National Water Trail threads 135 miles of tupelo and small Cajun towns — the first National Water Trail in Louisiana, and the one with Zydeco at the takeout during October's Shake Your TRAIL Feather.

North of that, Saline Bayou runs wild and primitive through Kisatchie National Forest, the state's only Wild and Scenic river, and the same national forest hides Kisatchie Bayou, which briefly becomes a sandstone-canyon whitewater run when December rains stack up — a half-mile anomaly in a state that, as one local put it, drops about three feet every four hundred miles.

A few things come with the territory. Spring and fall are the seasons; summer is hot and buggy in a way outsiders underestimate. Alligators are everywhere and mostly want nothing to do with you.

On popular cypress lakes the bass boats own the open water, so paddlers work the back coves. And on Bayou Teche, you'll portage the Keystone Lock south of St. Martinville — or end the day at Evangeline Oak and let that be enough.