Kayaking the Lower Osgood River

It didn't rain again today - yeah!! - so we did a round-trip paddle of a little over 13 miles on the Lower Osgood, beginning and ending at Meacham Lake. See the description of our 2007 paddle for a map. On the drive there we searched for the put-in upstream off Route 30 hoping that in the future we could do this as a one-way paddle, provided we had a second car or a group of folks. We found the put-in as described in the "Adirondack Paddler's Guide" at about 5.3 miles north of Paul Smiths at the Spring Lake outlet, and marked it on the GPS. We then paddled upstream toward that spot. We couldn't quite get to it (the guide said there would probably be at least one beaver dam in the way), but we got close and that put-in definitely seems doable. At that point we weren't interested in getting out of the boat yet again to investigate further. There are now 2 large trees blocking passage on the river and dragging over them, plus some small beaver dams, was enough. One reason I wanted to get back on the Lower Osgood is the wildflowers and we weren't disappointed. The cardinel flowers were in bloom, especially around Baker Pond, and the purple fringed orchis were beautiful.