I join iNaturalist projects in part to help science but mostly as a nudge to get me to try places I haven’t been to before. So when the Ohio Dragonfly Survey put out a call for more observations from Lawrence County (an hour and a half south of me), I jumped on the excuse to explore.
Actually, I usually spend a lot of time in Lawrence County. My favorite dispersed camping lake (Timbre Ridge) and backup dispersed camping lake (Lake Vesuvius) are both located there. But the two dams blew out during heavy flooding in spring 2025 and haven’t been fixed yet.
Poring over Google maps and National Forest maps, though, I realized there are other paddling and camping sites in the county worth checking out. So I carved 24 hours out of my schedule and headed south…
I started at the Arabia Canoe Launch at Symmes Creek…which is very rustic. It’s a carry-in site with a steep, muddy bank that makes getting in and out tricky (but feasible alone even in my heavier kayak). I summed up that part of the day in the video above — note the chocolate-milk water and copious obstacles, but also the wildlife that came to visit even with only a thin strip of trees in some spots separating me from humanity.
Paddling time: 2 hours fighting my way upsteam against a pretty strong current + 45 minutes floating back downstream
Portages: 2 going upstream, 1 going downstream (since I was able to scoot over the partially submerged log shown in the video on the way down).
Odonata: 9 species (highlights included the new-to-me Fawn Darner, plus the Dragonhunter in the video which is a new county record)
Conclusion: Symmes Creek was useful for data collection, but I’d probably only go back if I had a way to float downstream and be driven back up. Time to move on…
Even though the Arabia boat ramp is located in the National Forest (where dispersed camping is allowed), the creek itself is almost entirely on private land. Plus, I wouldn’t have wanted to haul my gear through all that mud anyway. So after my creek paddle, I headed half an hour north to another under-oded county (Gallia) to spend the night at the teensy-tiny Kenton Lake.
There, I got out of the car…and promptly spent 15 minutes recording 7 Odonata species (including the somewhat rare Banded Pennant, bottom right photo, which likes sandy-bottomed lakes).
Kenton is small enough that you can easily see one end from the other, but there’s no boat ramp so most of the human activity is on the shore close to the road. I did see another kayaker (fishing) early the next morning, but I was thrilled to be the only one on the water on a Friday afternoon.
Highlights of Kenton Lake: tranquility, excellent emergent vegetation, Whip-poor-wills yelling at dusk, very cute Brilliant Jumping Spider, sandy bottom made for serene lake soaking. I was running out of steam, though, so the video above only shows the parts I adored the most…half of which is spider footage.
Odonata: 10 species, including three individual Swamp Spreadwings (which is a lot by my standards — I generally run across only a handful of spreadwings per year. The spreadwing is the damselfly in the upper-right of the gallery of Odonata earlier in this post in case you’re geeking along at home).
What I would do differently next time: bring a full-size trashbag. Ever since reading Braiding Sweetgrass (highly recommended, but yes this is an affiliate link), I’ve been picking up every shred of human trash I find near my campsites, and this one had so much I ran out of bag to put it in. Although visiting a site with so much trash is a bit daunting, I know from experience that cleaning up a spot changes people’s mindsets and results in less trash in the future. Plus, the practice of giving gratitude to the earth this way is very satisfying, a tangible counterpoint to audibly saying “thank you” to beauty outdoors.
Conclusion: Kenton Lake is now my favorite backup dispersed camping lake, easily beating out the much larger but also much more heavily trafficked Lake Vesuvius. I guess my husband is right: I did just need to keep looking until I found another source of serenity close at hand!