Rappahannock River Kayak and Canoe Access (Virginia Outdoor Center)

The Rappahannock, which cuts through Fredericksburg on its 195-mile run from the Blue Ridge to the Chesapeake, passes through a town that spent the Civil War watching armies ford and bridge and dynamite those crossings. Above Fredericksburg, before the river slows into its tidal estuary, the water offers Class I and II rapids, with a few Class III runs near Remington — recreational paddling, not wilderness. Virginia Outdoor Center has a presence here. The Rappahannock above the fall line has long been canoe and kayak water, part of a watershed protected in various places as parcels of the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

The river's name comes from an Algonquian word meaning "river of quick, rising water" or "where the tide ebbs and flows" — the name the Rappahannock Tribe used. By the early 1700s, Governor Alexander Spotswood was recruiting Protestant settlers from the Rhineland-Palatinate and Switzerland to homestead the confluence where the Rappahannock meets the Rapidan, establishing the Germanna settlements to work the region's iron ore. The river became a working boundary: a barrier with few fords, a defensive line that changed hands through the war, finally bypassed by Grant in the Overland Campaign. During and after the first battle at Fredericksburg in December 1862, some 10,000 enslaved people crossed the river to Union lines — an exodus now marked on both banks and re-enacted annually.

If you want to paddle the Rappahannock in Fredericksburg, this is a place that will put you there.