Paddling in New York

New York is two paddling states pretending to be one. The Adirondack interior holds the most storied negotiated-release whitewater scene in the East; the harbor around New York City holds one of the most active urban paddling cultures anywhere.

Between them sit canoe wildernesses and a 450-mile canal trail that don't quite belong to either world. The Adirondack scene runs on dam water and hard-won agreements.

The Hudson River Gorge — roughly fifteen miles of wilderness Class III–V from the Indian to the North — is the centerpiece, supplemented by Lake Abanakee releases on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays from April through October.

April is the Big Water month: cold, pushy, age-restricted, with The Narrows and Soup Strainer running at their full ugly potential. By midsummer it settles into something families can do, and eleven-plus outfitters work it out of North Creek.

North and west of there, the Moose, Beaver, Raquette, Black, Salmon, and Mongaup all run on a release schedule that American Whitewater and clubs like KCCNY have defended for more than thirty years — among the first negotiated recreational releases in the country.

Sign-in sheets at every release weekend aren't a formality; they're the paper trail that keeps the agreements alive. The Bottom Moose draws a Class IV crowd and the Bottom Bottom Moose a Class V one, and both converge on Old Forge each October for MooseFest.

BeaverFest takes Labor Day weekend. Backyard Boat Shop runs the calendar; Eagle Creek's hotline updates the Wednesday before each release.

Spring also lights up the Ausable's branches around Keene, Upper Jay, and Wilmington Notch, and the Hoosic near Albany — a bypassed reach AW pried back open after the dam operator fenced paddlers out — is part of the same long advocacy story.

The flatwater world up there is just as serious in a quieter way. The St. Regis Canoe Area is the only designated canoe wilderness in the state: 18,400 motor-free acres, around 58 ponds, and the Nine Carries route stitching them together with portages. St.

Regis Canoe Outfitters has been moving people through it for decades.

South of the Park, the Saranac Lakes, the Fulton Chain at Old Forge, and the Essex Chain extend the tripping country, and the Canalway Water Trail threads the Erie, Cayuga–Seneca, Oswego, and Champlain canals through working locks paddlers can transit for free in fifteen or twenty minutes — though SUPs have to portage.

Then there's the city. The Downtown Boathouse at Pier 26 has put nearly half a million people on the Hudson for free since 1994. Inwood Canoe Club, founded in 1912, runs free Sunday paddles off Dyckman Street all summer and cleans the shoreline once a month.

Sebago in Brooklyn has been at it for over eighty years.

For experienced sea kayakers, the Manhattan circumnavigation — Hell Gate, the Battery, the Hudson — is the local proving ground, and the Greenway Water Trail technically runs all the way back up to the Adirondack headwaters, a 100-plus-site corridor connecting the two halves of the state on paper if not in feel.

You can run a Class V release in Old Forge on a Saturday and paddle past the Statue of Liberty on a Sunday. Almost nothing about those two days will be the same.