62 Cedar Creek Hole

     At river mile 132 Cedar Creek Hole is right at the edge of the Lower Buffalo Wilderness, if you’re looking for it on a map, it’s at the tip of the beak (bill) on the 'Duck Head'.  To get there we drive south on Hwy.101 through Rea Valley then Hand Valley and finally Old Buffalo.  At some point the state highway ends and in Old Buffalo which is nothing more than a few scattered houses the road changes names to Hathaway Road and turns to the southwest.

    Heading up Hathaway Hollow this good dirt road is on the north boundary of the Lower Buffalo Wilderness with a couple wilderness accesses along the way.  At the top of the hollow at a 4-way intersection you should have a high clearance vehicle with 4-wheel drive to continue, we go straight and down into the Cedar Creek drainage.

    The road now is literally and figuratively ‘going downhill fast’.  Soon the ‘road’ enters the little creek and mostly stays there until its confluence with Cedar Creek.  Now heading south along Cedar Creek, which the road crosses one more time before coming to an end at the Buffalo River.  You can probably park 3-4 vehicles here, but it would be tight.

    The good news is we’re parked right on the bank of the river, with no walk to camp necessary.  And the bad news, there is no beach, no gravel-bar just a steep, muddy bank into Cedar Creek Hole.  The hole appears to be quite deep, and we notice some big fish swimming around in the slow-moving water.

    There is no obvious trail anywhere, and not finding a safe route down to the water we decide Cedar Creek Hole is not a swimming hole but a fine fishing hole.  This is soon confirmed when a young man in a side-by-side pulls in and breaks out his fishing gear.  He scampers about halfway down the steep bank to a little ledge and tosses out his rig.  He tells us yesterday him and his brother caught a couple nice catfish here, ‘a 24 and a 27 incher’.

    I consult my map which shows gravel-bars on this side of the river both up and downstream just 200 yards or so from this spot but with no trail and thick underbrush in both directions we give up on Cedar Creek Hole.

Cedar Creek Hole (Nov. 2022)

    A rating is therefore low: 1 for accessibility since it’s over a mile from the top of Hathaway Hollow down to the river on a poor excuse of a road.  We made it with no problems, it was pretty fun driving down the creek, but it isn’t much of a road, more of an ATV trail.  Amenities gets a zero, as described above ‘this is a fishing hole not a swimming hole’.  Very remote, we met one fisherman so a score of 4 for popularity, that would be a 5 if it weren’t for the small parking area, with nothing but our truck and a side-by-side parked here it was tight turning around to get out.  My total for Cedar Creek Hole: 5.

    Having already decided we won’t be swimming at Cedar Creek Hole we head back up the road 100 yards or so to a campsite we had noticed on the way down.  It’s a nice campsite between the road and Cedar Creek.  Parked at the campsite we walk up to the road, and cross onto an old road trace with a faint trail heading around to the west.

concrete footings (Nov. 2022)

    This trail will make a nice hike upriver after summer ends, (for my return visit see:  132 Clabber and Cedar Creeks) but today with the humidity and poison-ivy it’s just not worth it.  We get as far as an old homesite with a stone and concrete foundation and a lot of debris including an old propane refrigerator.  So obviously someone lived here well into the 1940’s or later.  On our drive back through Rea Valley a little disappointed that we didn’t get to go swimming, we decide to try Maumee North.  Maybe there we'll have better luck.