If you're looking for a relaxing trip down a quiet Maine river, look no further than the Kennebago, which is easily accessed in nearby Oquossoc. The Kennebago flows, gently, into Mooselookmeguntic Lake. There is an easily accessible 3-mile stretch of the river that you can do as a one-way trip if you have two vehicles, but which we opted to do in both directions to bring it up to almost 6 miles.
For our trip we opted to take our kayaks, although we also saw some folks plying the river in a canoe. This stretch of the river is not particularly deep and when the water level is lower, as it was on this day, we found the lower draft and higher maneuverability of a kayak to be preferable. And while we haven't tried it yet, we suspect that a trip down Kennebago would be very enjoyable on an inner tube too.
We began by going against the current to make the return trip easier. As the Kennebago's current is very gentle it's no challenge at all to paddle upriver. Your primary adversary is actually a series of forks along the way, most of which lead to a dead end if you make the wrong choice. The good news is that most of these false routes are fairly short. We only had to backtrack once, and that added no more than 10 minutes to our trip. We found it kind of amusing, but we can't recommend this trip for anyone who's easily frustrated!
Including our wrong turn the three-mile trip upriver took about an hour and a half. The return trip was slightly faster thanks to a bit of help from the current and the fact that we didn't take any wrong turns. Although the banks of the river are mostly foliage, there are a couple of spots where you can pull out and enjoy a picnic, which we may do the next time we visit. Aside from a few birds we didn't get to see much wildlife, but that was probably because it was already late morning by the time we were out paddling. If you time it right you'll probably be rewarded, as we saw several unmistakable signs that animals had visited the river, including some moose tracks where we stopped to turn around.
To get to the put in simply take route 4 from Rangeley to Oquossoc and then turn right on 16. A mile and half down 16 there's a bridge over the Kennebago. The put in is just before the bridge on the left side of the road. The "parking area" is nothing more than an enlarged shoulder, but there is space enough for several cars to pull off and park. Click here for a map.
If you have two vehicles and want to do a one-way trip, the take out point is access via the "Abandoned Rail Rd" (as Google Maps calls it - it actually is a paved road), which is a right turn off of 16 just before the bridge over the Kennebago.
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