Bridge Creek

It is red and green. On the outskirts of Cullman, I don't know that I can recommend this creek except for a juicy chunk of class V known as Friendship Falls at the put-in. A split personality creek it truly is. The George Lake spillway (aka Friendship Falls) drops about 45 to 50' right out of the gate. It is a multi-part slide / waterfall rapid. It is quite runnable, though we only ran the last two drops. The 2nd or 3rd part pushes over to the right and impacts an old wall. This would be a bad place to flip since you would lose skin and possibly body parts on the ensuing drops. But it is certainly within the realm of the class V boater. You could actually easily bag this little baby and then take out on the bridge just downstream for a self contained class V infusion just off interstate 65.

The rest of the upper part is not bad though it is mostly class I and II and sports an abundance of logs. Just upstream of Eva Road Lake, the creek goes through four parallel tunnels under SR 157, each of which is clear as of 2/2001. Watch for nails hanging down from the ceiling. The lake paddle is just over 1 mile.

The steep ramp type spillway at the bottom of Eva Road Lake is probably runnable but you can go first. The rest of the run could be called sewer creek as sewer pipes cross the stream several times. Bridge Creek earns its chickens via sewage effluent. Some of these are right at water level, some are below, and some are above. In combination with a lack of rapids above class II and a large number of logs, this section is not really worth it as is.

The put-in is not hard to find. Off Hwy 31, turn east on either CR 1301 or CR 81 (the map says 81 but I remember 1301). Anyway, it is the first real road north of the Vericold plant on 31. It may also be called Lake George Rd. The take-out is on Eight Mile creek at SR 278 on the eastern edge of Cullman.

If you are into pain and amusement to the extreme, with an added bonus of breaking the law, you might consider Eight Mile creek. It drops heinously over the Catoma Lake spillway via a 60-70' multi-part waterfall. At the level I saw it it was nasty, but perhaps at lower water the skilled, highly motivated, and slightly irrational could be tempted. Downstream of there, it goes through a short class III at the base of the spillway and then is dead flat until 278. There is a bridge just downstream of the spillway in a subdivision that permits very easy viewing.

Bridge Creek

February 17, 2001

Originally from Winter 2000-2001 Exploratory Update

Written by Mark D

Dave Branham, Gary Holder, Richard Brown and I ran this creek in North Cullman. There is a really cool class V rapid at the put-in at Lake George. We only ran the last two drops of it. After that, the creek is class I and II with logs and lots of sewer pipes. These pipes have to be run over, walked around, or ducked under throughout the run. Their throughput adds to the bouquet of the creek most odiferously since we saw at least some evidence of leaks. Running this creek may be hazardous to your health. In the middle of the run, you paddle 1 mile across Eva Road Lake.