Paddling the Tennessee River
A Voyage on Easy Water
Kim Trevathan
Outdoor Tennessee Series
In late August 1998, Kim Trevathan and his dog, Jasper, set out by canoe on a long, slow trip down the 652 miles of the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio. Trevathan wanted to experience the river in its entirety, from Knoxville s narrow, winding channel, which flows past rocky bluffs, to the wide-open waters of Kentucky Lake at its lower end.
Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee s banks....

In late August 1998, Kim Trevathan and his dog, Jasper, set out by canoe on a long, slow trip down the 652 miles of the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio. Trevathan wanted to experience the river in its entirety, from Knoxville's narrow, winding channel, which flows past rocky bluffs, to the wide-open waters of Kentucky Lake at its lower end.
Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee's banks. He crossed the path of the explorer Meriwether Lewis along the Natchez Trace, noted the sites of...

Coldhearted River recounts the canoe odyssey of Kim Trevathan and photographer Randy Russell down the Cumberland River-almost 700 miles-fromHarlan, Kentucky, through Middle Tennessee and Nashville, then back into western Kentucky, where it spills into the Ohio. The Cumberland presented spectacular gifts to the adventurers: the morning when tiny fog tornadoes swirled gently around their paddles and the night above Cumberland Falls when they built a fire on a beach and watched rapids flash across the river. But, as it presented gifts, the river also presented danger. A fifteen-hour rain...

Coldhearted River recounts the canoe odyssey of Kim Trevathan and photographer Randy Russell down the Cumberland River--almost 700 miles--from Harlan, Kentucky, through Middle Tennessee and Nashville, then back into western Kentucky, where it spills into the Ohio. The Cumberland presented spectacular gifts to the adventures: the morning when tiny fog tornadoes swirled gently around their paddles and the night above Cumberland Falls when they built a fire on a beach and watched rapids flash across the river. But, as it presented gifts, the river also presented danger. A fifteen-hour rain...

After the death of his paddling companion, a German shepherd labrador retriever mix namedJasper, Kim Trevathan began a series of solitary upstream kayaking quests in search of whathe calls liminal zones, transitional areas where dammed reservoirs give way to the currentof the rivers that feed them. For four years he scoured the rivers and lakes of America, whereenvironmentally damaging, and now decaying, man-made structures have transformed thewaterways. In this thoughtful work, he details his upriver adventures, describing the ecologicaland aesthetic differences between a dammed river and a...