This summer has been the summer of turning up the adventure level. This is probably a result of hanging out a lot more with the rock climbing folks, who are already pretty solid adventurers, and then continuing to adventure more. These days, I’ve found that my sweet spot of adventure has been to go for scrambling through cool terrain. Compared to rock climbing, you can cover much more distance, and therefore go on much more of a real exploration into the unknown style adventure.

This weekend I went on a trip to Vermont with some friends. We would be camping by the Waterbury Reservoir, which is a roughly Y-shaped reservoir with each end about two miles long. Given that this was a nice big reservoir, I decided to bring the classic air mattress and propeller drill setup, the no-frills but surprisingly effective combination for motive fun on a body of water. I brought three fully charged batteries, which I figured would be enough for whatever adventure. I didn’t really have a plan here, just brought it because why not.

Before driving up, I got a chance to check out Google earth and mountain project for fun activities in the vicinity. A fellow climber from work (with about 30 more years of experience than I have) said that one of his favorite activities in the wild was to find a river and hike it, either staying dry by hopping from boulder to boulder, or getting wet and hiking fully in the river. This sounded like a great style of adventure to me. On Google earth, I found, poking out from the north end of the reservoir, what looked to be a pretty good-sized river, with an interesting feature that I eventually found out was a landslide. This river was Cotton Brook. It had some trails nearby (aptly named the “Cotton Brook Trails”), but none of these trails reached to where we were camping at the southern end of the reservoir .

This river looked pretty cool from google earth, so exploration was in order. But, getting to it would be hard, given that we were camping about two miles south and no trails existed that direction. Bushwhacking that far would be a total pain. I thought that maybe if the reservoir was low, I might be able to walk along the bank to reach the mouth of the river. That would be quite far though, given that the shoreline wasn’t straight, and in any case it turned out the reservoir was full so no shore was exposed. But, while hanging around the campsite in VT, a wild thought occurred: I had brought the propeller-drill setup. How about prop-drilling across the entire reservoir, straight to the mouth of the river, and then scrambling the river from there????

A PLAN IS FORMED…….

This was a pretty serious adventure though. I would be going solo, miles into totally unknown territory, riding an air mattress on the reservoir, powered by a drill that is not waterproof. Time to pray I guess, the adventure spirit does not concern itself with these details. I would be going solo because none of my comrades wanted to go on my wild adventure, and realistically, the air mattress really only fits one person anyways if you want to get anywhere at a decent speed.

I estimated that going from the boat launch to the mouth of the river would be about 3 miles one way, which was a stretch for a drill boating adventure. Additionally, my friends back at the campsite said that I might have to meet them at a different pull-out location, which ended up doubling the return trip distance (although I did not know that at the time). However, I had three batteries, so I figured I would do the Scuuba method of one out, one back, and one reserve, and if anything bad happened in the first battery I would abort. I also figured worst-case, I could swim and push the mattress. It turned out in the end that the one way trip to the river was only two instead of three miles, but the trip from the river to the pull-out added an extra mile, so the distances balanced each other and I had battery to spare.

Sunday morning I woke up early at 9:30AM, early by vacation standards. I quickly packed up all my stuff, shoved it in a friends car, and ran down to the boat launch. I ended up leaving the boat launch at 11AM. All in a hurry to get to adventuring!

Propeller drilling has a certain serenity to it once you get going:

I tried to conserve battery as much as possible by using a reduced drill speed. I navigated over the lake avoiding the occasional partially submerged tree, remembering that a single submerged log to the air mattress could mean a potential unplanned swim and the loss of all my stuff. I continued to pray to the brushless gods.

After about an hour of boating, I reached the mouth of the river. It took a bit of time to figure out which mouth was the correct one, as the layout of the shoreline was different from that on google maps. I guess the sands shifted a lot here.

The first surprise was that the river looked substantially smaller than it had looked from google earth, although this observation eventually turned out to be only partially correct, as I would find out. I boated in as far as I could, then got out and pushed the air mattress with the drill. This was pretty fun actually and with no weight on it, the air mattress was easy to push.

After going in a bit further I stashed the air mattress, pump, and drill, and batteries in the woods, and then began my hike. This is where the real adventuring began.

After hopping under and over some pine trees, I came to a strange sight: what appeared to be a forest carpeted in stone. What do you mean by this? Honestly, words can’t really describe the situation, as I’ve never come across anything like this before. The best way I could describe it was a forest, in which all shrubbery had been removed, and replaced by a foot thick layer of gravel and small boulders. I’ve never walked in a gravel forest before, so this was very weird. Upon thinking further, Vermont experienced extremely large floods in 2023, and I guess this was some of the remnants. But, 2025 has been pretty dry, so now the river is only a small brook running through the left of this image. This explained the google earth discrepancy: the riverbed itself was large as it had been carved by a big flood, but the river had then shrunk substantially.

I found this pretty cool pine tree, rising from the rubble. What was becoming apparent to me is that this river had been insane during the floods. But, especially because it has been a very dry summer, the river had shrunk to just a tiny brook.

After trekking through this strange scenery for a few hundred feet, I found what the original path of the river had been. Whoa.

This breathtaking carnage was on a level I had never seen before. Somehow this gigantic mass of dead trees, roughly ten foot thick, 100′ across, and stretching as far as I could see, had come down the whole river and then stuck only about 500′ from the reservoir. I hopped across some of the trees and continued up the river.

I continued up the river. Just as suddenly as the destruction had showed up, it disappeared, leaving a (relatively) easy path to walk through. These boulders were pretty shifty though, so it payed to be quick on your feet.

So far in this adventure, I wore just the classic crocs, which made it easy to walk directly in the river. However, as the river became smaller, I switched to sneakers, which made it easier to go faster. But, wanting to keep the sneakers dry, I had to take them off every time I had to cross the river. Most of the time I was able to hop between conveniently placed boulders, but some time the boulder on the other side was just out of reach. Rather than take off both sneakers for this situation, I found it was often possible to take off one only one, and then step between boulders with the other, keeping it dry. This technique allowed me to move quickly through the river, as I only had to take off one shoe and not both.

After about a mile of hop-between-rocks hiking I eventually found the landslide:

Looking to my left, I could see that probably about a quarter mile of the mountain had shifted and slid down into the river. I’m not sure at what level the land was originally, but I would guess that it was higher than it is now. Looking to my right, I got a pretty good sight. Potentially, the ground used to be up there:

The scrambling was pretty efficient from here on upwards. The level of carnage decreased slowly as I travelled upwards, but evidence of high flow was still very apparent in spots. It was also interesting to see paths through the woods where I guess the original river had been, but then to walk in the new channel that the river had excavated.

I found a very nice mossy boulder.

I chose to turn around at nice crystal-blue water pool, where I took a swim in the cold water. I measured the distance on google earth later, and found that I was almost exactly 2 miles from the mouth of the river. I covered this ground in a bit over an hour.

I was able to make fast progress on the way down because many of the big impossible uphill boulder were now possible downhill boulder hops. And, I now had more of a technique. In one place, where a stone bridge across a wider section of river did not exist, I used some gravity on a precariously placed boulder to suddenly create a footbridge with a splash.

In one place a landslide had created a ton of downed trees. I was able to climb across these trees which was fun. It was also interesting to see that this had not been a full landslide in some places, just the ground had only slid a few feet and fissures had opened up in the earth, exposing darker soil.

The water was very blue! Tempting to drink….

I scrambled back down through the major landslide. Some of the boulders in the landslide area were really unstable, and I stubbed my toe pretty bad after a good sized boulder shifted. Not too bad though, but it definitely paid to be alert on where to step. Soon after the landslide, the river became red. I believe the landslide must have exposed some iron which was then seeping into the river. It was impressive how the river switched from blue to red.

After some more talus field scrambling, I was back to the boulder forest. I switched back to my crocs here and walked through this watery boulder field. The pictures here honestly do not do it justice at all- it was really, really cool and kind of surreal to see the water winding through the tree roots.

I recovered the air mattress from the woods, pumped it up, and got going again:

Back on the move.

By now it was getting a bit late in the day, and I now had to make it all the way back across the reservoir. I called the others and found that the group had moved to the other side of the reservoir, and therefore I would have to boat almost twice as far to get to them. This was not necessarily a problem- I had not even used one battery to get all the way down to the far end of the lake. Not wanting to be late to meet the group, I decided to turn up the speed a bit and see how things went. Propulsive power goes with the cube of velocity for a boat, so I decided to go from the very low battery-conserving speed I had used on the way down to a medium speed and see how far I went before needing to swap batteries.

Things went great! I did stop to pump up the air mattress once on the way back, but that’s pretty much the only detour needed. I swapped batteries here as well, but didn’t even totally drain the first battery. Pretty solid!

I made it to the pullout fully on the other end of the reservoir with battery to spare.

Looking back at the route, I ended up going a bit over 6 miles, using three batteries. This is insane, who knew that a dewalt could propel a human on an air mattress for 6 miles. I’d guess that if you use a slow battery-conserving speed, it is possible to do about 3 miles per battery, at a speed of about 2 miles per hour.

A great Vermont adventure. Stay tuned for more to come!