E) Stevens Point: Whiting Dam, Al Tech County Park (PnP, 0.6mi.)

Bryan Foster provides (2012-05-10): The low head dam in the county park here is very dangerous. Upstream a few hundred yards are some waves that are surfable, with eddy access on river left. You can entertain yourself with some eddy line tricks. There is a small parking area (fisherman's parking) for one or two cars off West River Drive at the waves, but this requires a ferry across a fast flowing and wide Wisconsin River, and just downstream is the low head dam. It does have a route down the right side that is technically runnable. Below the dam/spillway are some class II waves/rapids. I did this when the Wisconsin gauge at Rothschild was at 5590 cfs. (See the pictures uploaded on AW.) I also have heard a rumor of the center of the low head dam being run (there is a kicker in the middle). I personally think it is not worth the risk to run the kicker or the right side of this dam as it looks to be an excessively dangerous recirculating killer low head dam. (I would even estimate that it had a 4' height differential from the hole to the boil water when I was there.) The wave was present at a flow of ~4.5 kcfs at the Stevens Point dam via a NOAA gauge: http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph\_to\_xml.php?gage=stpw3&output=tabular A user ("pinky79") provided (2012-08-13): From Al Tech park there are some channels that can be run on the back side of the spillway island. (Looking across the spillway there is an island -- on the back side there is another spillway/channel). Cross the river to follow the left hand shore down stream, go up and around the island and back upstream for a short distance and you will see the back spillway. You can then portage up a trail on the island until you get to a concrete wall (~300yds ). The trail starts at the end of the first small channel. (There is an old orange "Dam ahead" buoy on shore -- must have gone over years back. Start the portage from there.) You can put in next to the wall. There are multiple channels to run. These runs are shallow in the summer on normal flows but are fun in bigger flows.