My delightfully foggy paddle on the Swift River in Belchertown, Massachusetts, began with a downpour that started right when I drove into the launch site parking lot and ended fifteen minutes later.

It added enough mugginess and cloudiness to the already-warm day to set things up nicely for a thick bank of fog to form over the river’s icy cold water.  In years past I had seen only very faint patches of fog here and there, never a blanket like this time.

To understand why the Swift water is so cold one needs to go back nearly a century. 

Three branches of the Swift used to run through the Swift River Valley north of our launch site, but in the late 1800s, Boston was looking for a water source.  Work took decades, but by 1946 the new Windsor dam stopped the flow of all three branches.  Towns were flooded and the valley became the Quabbin Reservoir, with water piped 65 miles east to Boston. 

What remained of the Swift trickled south out of the bottom of the dam, the coldest water of the very deep reservoir.  It joins the Ware River at the town of Three Rivers, about 18 miles south.

The very cold water not only means great fog on a hot summer day, but it also makes the Swift a premier trout fishing spot in Massachusetts, especially the short section between the dam and Route 9, where fly fishing only is permitted. 

Our launch spot is further south, at Cold Spring Road.  Downed trees kept us from getting up to Route 9 but we were able to paddle far enough north to see my favorite things on the Swift: the yard art at a couple of the riverside residences.

All the photos from the trip are below. Click on any one to see a slide show of large images. You’ll notice that I waited until the fog lifted to get decent shots of the yard art. To see Swift River photos from previous visits, go here and here.