See below to watch a bit of the adventure down the Beriman River in Papa New Guinea that allowed Ben Stookesbury, Chris Korbulic, Pedro Oliva and Ben Marr to be nominated for National Geographic’s Adventure of the Year award. Read the interview with Ben Stookesbury here.
Before every great river run comes a moment when paddlers make a subtle and sometimes unconscious decision that could change their lives forever.
“You can run a hard rapid every day, but maybe one day you’re thinking about Brennan and you think, ‘Today I’m going to walk around it,’” says Montana paddler Jason Shreder.
Shreder, like many other paddlers in Missoula, Montana, takes that quiet moment with an air of somber reflection. He says he stills thinks about the death of hometown paddler Brennan Guth, who died on the Rio Palguin in Chile in 2001.
Guth became the namesake for Brennan’s Wave, a popular whitewater feature on the Clark Fork River that runs through the heart of downtown Missoula. A functional irrigation structure divides the river into three channels—two of which have formed powerful waves attracting kayakers, surfers and standup paddleboarders since it was completed in 2006.
A decade before, this section of the Clark Fork looked very different. Crooked rebar and concrete acted as a sticky web for debris floating down the river. When talk began around town to repurpose the irrigation diversion for a multi-use whitewater structure, Guth got involved.
After his death, his father asked for donations to go toward the river project. Those donations became the seed money that got the $300,000 construction project off the ground and solidified Missoula’s reputation as a river town.
Brennan’s Wave quickly became a favorite among local paddlers and contributed to the growth of the sport in the city. In June 2010, 5,000 spectators lined the banks at Brennan’s Wave to watch 200 competitors vie for top place at the U.S. Freestyle Kayaking Championships.
Located adjacent to festival hub Caras Park, paddlers surf to live music on Thursday nights and next to the farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. There are now plans to build another wave farther downstream.
“Brennan would be happy with this legacy,” says local paddler and whitewater legend, Doug Ammons. “Whether you’re in a kayak or on a surfboard, people are free with beta and encouragement; there’s a sense of camaraderie that’s more like what I experienced when I started paddling back in the mid-70s.”
Land Heflin, an instructor at Tarkio Kayak Adventures in Missoula, says it can be hard to explain the adrenaline rush that draws so many to the river.
“We built a society around safety, but there’s a primal side that needs this, to throw yourself out there into the world,” says Heflin.
In 2004, with Guth’s death still a recent memory, another local paddler, Jonathan Sullivan, died on the Rio Manso in Chile, followed by 17-year-old Max Lentz in 2007 on a creeky line on West Virginia’s Gauley River.
Heflin says the series of three deaths affected Missoula paddlers. He saw a shift away from creeking and towards playboating. Most noticeable has been an overall attitude of awareness and more safety-conscious paddling. The Clark Fork became a place for the local paddling community to come together and heal.
Shreder, now the owner of Montana adventure tourism company Zoo Town Surfers, never knew Guth, but says he’s often felt like he’s been paddling in Guth’s ghostly shadow.
In 2008, on a trip to Chile, Shreder came upon the spot on the Rio Palguin where Guth died. On the side of the riverbank he stood and stared in silence. After a few moments, he picked up his boat and walked around the rapid. Even years after Guth’s passing, his presence is still felt.
Brennan’s Wave solidified Missoula’s reputation as a river town. | Feature photo: Robin Carleton
Nineteen eighty-one was the dim pre-dawn of sea kayaking’s boom times. Just around the corner were the first coastal symposia, cheap plastic touring kayaks and sea kayaking magazines. Baby boomers settled into careers that paid for kayaks but clung to the hippie sensibilities that motivated them to keep taking their vacations in the wilderness. A couple decades of double-digit growth transformed kayaks on the roof rack from head-turners to ho-hum.
The year 1981 also marked the release of one of the original sea kayaking instructional books, John Dowd’s Sea Kayaking: The Classic Manual for Touring, from Day Trips to Major Expeditions. Thirty-four years and 60,000 copies later, in the introduction to the book’s sixth addition, Dowd laments the trends that have accompanied the sport’s recent reversal of fortune.
Sea Kayaking: The Classic Manual for Touring, from Day Trips to Major ExpeditionsStill regarded as “the bible” for both new and experienced kayakers after more than thirty years in print, Sea Kayaking covers the basics of equipment and technique, including types of paddles and strokes, as well as such essential skills as how to read the weather and the water, how to navigate with and without GPS and how to travel with a group. Drawing on his many years of experience paddling in all climates, John Dowd presents practical advice on dealing with potential hazards (from surf to sea ice to sharks), carrying out rescues and planning for long-distance expeditions.
Dowd had a unique perspective on kayaking during the early 2000s. For a decade he and his wife Bea lived off the grid in a cedar-shake cabin on a surf- swept beach in Clayoquot Sound, a popular kayaking destination. At first the Dowds routinely saw 30 or 40 kayakers at a time camping on “their” beach—my wife and I were once among them. Ten years later, the only visitors on a long weekend were some campers dropped off by water taxi.
“It wasn’t a sudden shift,” he writes. “More and more we’d been seeing groups of wannabe guides, kayak instructors-in-training and occasional school parties replace the private groups…. An increasing focus on standards and certifications had already begun to change the nature of the sport from an escapist activity for adventurers to a regulated activity for recreational groups and clubs, but something else was surely going on.”
Indeed, a lot has changed. Dowd’s Clayoquot tenure saw the onslaught of the iPhone and the Great Recession. Times are tougher now and we’re all working two jobs to pay for granite countertops and smartphone data plans for the whole family. Boomers are getting too old to sleep on the ground. And personally, when I landed on Dowd’s beach my wife was pregnant and seasick; today, that baby is six years old and a lot harder to pack—ditto for her little brother. The next time we went to Tofino we skipped the kayaking and booked a hotel near town.
Apparently, we aren’t the only ones. According to Dowd, people are still buying kayaks for day trips, but sales of full-length touring kayaks are down by 50 percent.
Still, Dowd suggests that along with these social factors, his experiences demonstrate how the “bureaucratization of sea kayaking” is at least part of what snuffed out its popularity. He posits that the push to professionalization in the kayaking industry has been a step backward for a sport whose greatest appeal is the simple escape that it offers from an increasingly risk-averse and programmed world.
I learned to kayak exactly 20 years ago by walking into a shop and buying one of the boats hanging from the ceiling. Soon I was flailing around in storm waves at the beach, practicing clumsy paddle float self-rescues I’d read about in books like Dowd’s. My discomfort on timid forays into the ocean’s unfamiliar waves and currents quickly taught me how much I had yet to learn.
I felt my own way forward, building up to multi-day trips on the open coast, rolling, surfing tidal rapids, an 80-day expedition, working at this kayaking magazine. Then, overnight, it seemed that every advanced paddler I met was some kind of guide or instructor. They’d ask me about my level of certification and I wouldn’t know what to say.
The same phenomenon of credential overproduction has befallen society as a whole. The world is now so full of highly educated people looking for somewhere to sell their expensive knowledge that it’s hard to break into just about any field, even with an advanced degree. It befits those who hold the credentials to convince everybody else that they’re necessary. But—take it from me, a guy with a master’s degree in outdoor recreation and a post-grad diploma in journalism who went on to write stories about kayaking—we don’t have to believe the hype.
“I foresee a time when you will need to be certified in order to buy or rent a kayak.”
This phenomenon spills over to everyday life, where it seems you can’t do anything without expert advice. Most of the people I see working out at the gym are under the direct supervision of a personal trainer with a string of initials after his name. There are professional coaches for everything: organization, nutrition, wellness, even life itself. Last time our kids were being brats, my wife insisted we needed a parenting coach.
“What did the cavemen do?” I retorted. Somehow traditional societies managed to raise their own successful, well-adjusted children without experts. They also invented kayaking.
Nowadays, society discourages us from thinking for ourselves and taking risks, and we’ve infected our kids with the same paranoia. Some say this helicopter parenting is producing a generation of pathologically anxious and dependent young adults.
It used to be that youth were the ones with the time to go on crazy long wilderness expeditions. Now, kayak touring appears too scary for the only generation with the time to do it. Besides, they’re all too busy paying off the student loans for the PhDs on their Starbucks resumes.
In my youth, people learned to do things for themselves because the world was not so populated with experts and coaches. If you wanted to learn to kayak, you just bought the gear and did it, sometimes with a detour to the library for a John Dowd book. If you needed company, you invited a friend. Once you figured it out, you became the expert. The roads to the wilderness were not paved. There were no tolls or gatekeepers. The camping was free. You could land on a remote beach and the guy who wrote the book would be there to welcome you to the club.
Today, we spend more time working so we can pay others to tell us how to spend our time off. Kayaking was supposed to take us away from all that.
“I foresee a time when you will need to be certified in order to buy or rent a kayak,” writes Dowd. So get out there and do some escapist adventuring while you still can. Listen to me, your kayaking life coach, before I start billing by the hour.
Tim Shuff is a firefighter, freelance writer and former editor of Adventure Kayak who realized he’d hit middle age when he found himself writing the phrases “in my youth” and “kids these days.”
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Adventure Kayak magazine.
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From Painters And Carvers, To Weavers & Mapmakers, Meet Six Acclaimed Artists Inspired By The Path Of The Paddle
When Rob Mullen flies into Minakokosa Lake late this summer, about 10 miles north of the Kobuk River in northwest Alaska, he’ll have his painting boards and a field kit with acrylic paints, brushes, pens, pencils and pallets. The small supplies backpack will be stowed with his other expedition gear in the canoe. Opportunity is everything for wilderness artists, he says.
“I may not use all of them, but I will do lots of sketches,” says Mullen. The award-winning owner of Paint n’ Paddle Studio in Bolton, Vermont, Mullen is also the executive director of the Wilderness River Expedition Art Fellowship, a non-profit he founded in 2005 to encourage what he calls, “the art of conservation.”
Each summer, Mullen invites a small group of artists to immerse themselves in nature on wilderness paddling journeys. Thirty, including renowned wildlife artist, Robert Bateman, have joined him over the years.
“On tough trips I may not get a lot of work done because I’m exhausted,” Mullen explains. “On a 2013 trip (to Alaska) I got four paintings done the entire time. But if something grabs me and is inspirational, and on solo trips especially, I’ll pull over and paint.”
Mullen’s Alaskan foray this season completes a three-year, 900- mile circumnavigation of the western Brooks Range by canoe with other artists. The route began on the Noatak River in 2012. The group finishes on the Kobuk River this year, having paddled 350 miles to Kotzebue, Alaska, on the coast of the Chukchi Sea. It is Mullen’s 16th art expedition organized to highlight Boreal forest conservation.
“Canoeing and painting are both a way of exploring wilderness,” says Mullen, who spent 16 years in New York City working as a freelance commercial artist before having a change of heart. He left the city in 1994 to return to Vermont, where he grew up.
“I did cigarettes, cosmetics and booze. The work was mind- numbing,” Mullen exclaims. “So, I’d go on big canoe trips. They were my tonic from Manhattan advertising.”
“Doing wilderness art is my way of trying to remind people that we are part of nature. Canoeing has been the heart and soul of my work,” he adds.
It also nearly got him in trouble in 2013 when Mullen was charged by a grizzly bear while on the Reed River in Alaska. The charge forced Mullen to put a warning shot by the bear’s ear. He later painted the scene.
A self-taught artist, Mullen began drawing as a child. He got his college degree in biology, planning to become a biological illustrator, but the money was too good in Manhattan, “A lion’s den of intense pressure,” he calls it.
That ability to produce under pressure aids him as an artist in the bush today. The Alaskan tundra can be a tough place to paint. High winds and rain can be a problem. The bugs, he says, are brutal.
“You can pick a sheltered spot to deal with the wind, and you can get under a tarp in the rain, but bugs are a huge problem,” Mullen says. “They get in your face and then into your paint.”
See more of Rob Mullen’s work at paintnpaddlestudio.com.
Chris Pearson’s love for canoes began as an eighth-grade boy on a church camp canoe trip. It’s never waned. A 16- foot Kevlar Mad River Explorer hangs in his garage today. He speaks of it fondly, having paddled it to James Bay on the Missinaibi River.
But Pearson believes he was born 100 years too late. He swoons sentimentally about old wood and canvas canoes, five of which also sit in his garage. It’s down in his basement sanctuary and wood shop that his affinity for canoes truly becomes apparent. Amid antique lanterns and North Woods paraphernalia sit four immaculate models of historic wooden canoes he painstakingly researched and built.
“Building these blends two of my life loves together: the art of canoes and working to scale with my hands. I love the feel of wood and the smell of it,” exclaims Pearson, a professional model builder in the automotive industry. He built his first miniature canoe in 1989 while recuperating from back surgery.
Pearson’s works are sought by paddlers and non-paddlers, art lovers and collectors. One was displayed at the Canadian Canoe Museum in 2008, part of an exhibit called “The Canoe in Miniature.” To date, he’s built 75 for paying clients who also buy his miniature dioramas, which depict canoe-related scenes.
A 1/8th scale replica of an E.M. White Sport, named Carlotta after his grandmother, sits perched in a woodsy diorama on a shelf in his basement. Each tiny boiled rib and woven cane seat appears as they would have on a full-sized White in the late 1800s when the Maine canoe maker was producing them. Pearson’s miniature Racine canoes replicate early 1900s Wisconsin designs, but his favorite is the larger, 1/5th scale E.H. Gerrish.
Evan Gerrish began building canoes in Bangor, Maine, in the 1800s. Historians credit him with the first commercial wood and canvas designs that evolved from birch bark canoes, but retained certain traditional elements. Gerrish used cane wrappings, for example, to simulate spruce root wrappings found on Native canoes.
“My favorite, by far, is my Gerrish. It’s so elemental,” says Pearson.
His fascination with miniatures blossomed on a grade school trip to a museum in Rochester, New York, where he saw an Iroquois Indian diorama. “Seeing that did something to me; it was cool,” Pearson says. “That’s how I got into model making.”
Forty to 60 hours are required to build each of Pearson’s models; they sell for $800 to $2,000.
Pearson’s dioramas are often built inside Coleman lanterns or on top of Coleman camping stoves. A favorite is “Fresh Off The Form,” a shelf-mounted look at a 1930s era canoe builder’s shop. Inside are a partially complete canoe, a tiny craftsman, and his tools. On the wall is a no smoking sign, a girl in bathing suit pin-up, and a picture of his late-father, a master tinsmith and significant early influence.
“I lost my father eight years ago. I used to love to fart around in his shop as boy,” Pearson says. “He was my best friend, so I put a picture of him in there.”
For environmentalist and watercolor artist Nan Sidler, wild spaces have always been important. Based in the canoe-culture mecca of Peterborough, Ontario, it’s only natural the canoe would make a regular appearance in her work.
“I paint what I love and canoeing has long been a wonderful part of what I love,” she says. “Canoes are often a focal point in my work because it’s the vehicle of entry into the natural world.”
Watercolor is an ideal medium for capturing that world, she adds, whether it’s reflections in the water, rays of light filtered by trees, clouds or campfire smoke, or the early morning mist rising from lakes and waterfalls. “It’s spectacular. All of these are inspirations for my paintings.” Though known in the paddling world for her canoescapes, Sidler paints equally lovely close-ups of natural world objects in exquisite detail, including shells, leaves and plants.
Since she does most of her painting in her attic studio, Sidler takes a series of photographs when a scene inspires her and refers back to the photos at home when it’s time to paint.
“I sometimes take a spit box—a tiny collapsible watercolor set with some favorite brushes and small sheets—and paint if there’s time on a canoe trip,” she adds. However, those are just drafts for larger, formal paintings, which take anywhere from a few days to a week to complete.
Sidler has painted since she was a child, but since retiring from her career as a primary school teacher after 34 years, she has had more time and more energy to devote to her artwork.
“I’ve been very lucky to be able to pursue this second career,” she says. “I now consider myself an artist and that’s an amazing goal to have reached. As a kid I always said I wanted to be an artist. Everyone was like, ‘Okay, but what are you really going to do?’”
When she’s not painting or keeping up with a busy exhibition schedule, Sidler is a longtime volunteer at the Canadian Canoe Museum, where replicas of her work are sold.
She says the most rewarding part about being an artist is when she sees viewers connect emotionally with her artwork.
“Traveling by canoe is an opportunity to journey into wilderness,” says Sidler. “You move in silence and peace, leaving behind only a trail of small waves. When you reach your destination you are tired but restored in spirit, and so appreciative of the beauty around you.” She believes it’s viewing that beauty and fragility of the natural world that creates a feeling of responsibility to sustain it for future generations.
“I hope my art encourages viewers to explore this beauty for themselves, and to accept stewardship of this land we have borrowed, so it remains for others to enjoy.”
See more of Nan Sidler’s art at sidlerart.com.
He’s a local treasure, mapping a labyrinth of canoe routes that crisscross Manitoba, and inspiring countless paddlers to discover the wilderness via river byways.
Many consider Réal Bérard’s hand-drawn maps to be works of art. Not intended as navigational charts, each is annotated with Bérard’s illustrations, old trapper songs, botanical notes, recipes, historic anecdotes, biographies, as well as markings for every waterfall, rapid and portage—measured out in paces like the Voyageurs—along Manitoba’s rivers.
“When I first put my hands on one of his maps, I was transported to the rivers,” says Jonathan Berger of Philadelphia, author of the extraordinary The Canoe Atlas of the Little North. “His drawings give me my aesthetic lens through which I view the North.”
Bérard got his route mapping start when he snared a summer job with Manitoba’s Department of Natural Resources in 1962. That season his supervisor sent him and two others on a 500-kilometer canoe trip.
It was a dry summer and the canoeists were ostensibly to help extinguish any forest fires they came upon. The trip took a month, ending at the mouth of Berens River at Lake Winnipeg. They never saw a single forest fire.
In those days, conservation staff was required to keep daily logs, which Bérard dutifully did. A few years later, with Bérard now a full-time employee, the supervisor asked him to make a canoe route map from his notes and drawings, as a way of encouraging people to experience Manitoba’s wilderness.
Bérard made his first map, and filled in the margins with local lore and history. He continued mapping waterways for the province for the next 20 years, producing 13 maps to date. They include dominant rivers like the Assiniboine and Winnipeg, and well-known canoeing routes like the Bird and Manigotagan rivers. Most have a central theme specific to that area, exploring native culture or the fur trade for example.
A full-time artist since 1990, Bérard’s other artistic endeavors include being an award-winning ice sculptor. He has also been the political cartoonist for 30 years at La Liberté, a weekly Francophone newspaper in Manitoba.
And he still canoes. Last year, Bérard, 79, and a friend, an 82-year-old trapper, paddled for a week on a loop that starts on the Nelson River in Northern Manitoba. He is currently making a map of the little known route, which is an easy trip, accessible by road and without rapids. When asked if he isn’t a little old to be making such treks, he responded in his characteristically unconventional way: “I’d rather be eaten by wolves and ravens, than by maggots.”
Order Réal Bérard’s maps at www.paddle.mb.ca.
The Voyageur’s most distinctive marker, the finely woven ceintures fleche, is a traditional art form kept alive by a handful of fingerweavers today, including Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Carol James.
These decorative sashes, worn by fur traders of The North West Company, were versatile tools for wilderness travelers, used as rope, pouches and for warmth. Some historians also believe they were used as core support to prevent hernias while portaging heavy loads.
Far more passionate about this textile technique than the canoeing-related history of the sash, James particularly loves the simplicity of fingerweaving—it’s done entirely by hand and requires nothing other than the yarn to weave and a hook on the wall.
James can weave about an inch per hour. The average finger woven sash takes about 60 hours to complete. Some sashes use as many as 286 individual strands. Depending on the type of yarn used, these one-of-a-kind pieces can sell for well over $500 per foot.
Her clients tend to be collectors and heritage connoisseurs. “The people who purchase these sashes clearly value the culture and history, and that type of traditional handcrafted work,” says James. She notes that there are machine-made replicas woven overseas that sell for just $20 to $30.
A former nurse, for three years James worked in the Artist in Healthcare program at the St-Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg. She was stationed in the lobby where she practiced her art.
“The hospital was stunned at the response. People would come and just sit and watch,” she says. “Weaving creates an atmosphere of calm and harmony in a place where those feelings are hard to come by.” The meditative benefits James claims extend to the viewer, she says.
Fingerweaving helped her connect with many of the patients. “The sash plays a role in the heritage of three cultures that were represented in the hospital: the First Nations, the French and the Métis.”
James has always been interested in textiles, and could embroider and crochet before kindergarten. It was her French Canadian fiancé who introduced her to the ceintures fleche. He asked her to weave him one for their wedding to represent his heritage. James was excited to learn the new technique.
After a family move to Winnipeg in 1990, James began volunteering at Fort Gibraltar, where the annual Festival du Voyageur takes place, and fingerweaving in her role as a re-enactor there.
“I was the only one who either knew fingerweaving or was willing to attempt it again,” she says. She provided tutorials to teach other volunteers and was later asked to teach classes and create learning materials. That provided the inspiration to eventually publish her first book, Fingerweaving Untangled in 2008—the only English manual of its kind—and become a fulltime weaver.
James acknowledges learning the eye-hand coordination of fingerweaving requires a bit of commitment. “It’s like learning how to drive a stick shift, people say, ‘I can’t do it.’ But once you’ve done it a number of times, you do it without thinking. That’s when it can become relaxing and meditative,” she says.
As proof, James adds that she teaches basic fingerweaving techniques to grade school classes. “All the children end up with a bracelet by the end of class, which proves that anyone can do it. It just takes a bit of time to sit down and finger it out.”
Find Carol James online at sashweaver.com.
In the 12-by-12-foot wood shop behind his suburban Detroit home, Kent Lund spends hours carving and painting canoe paddles. The Michigan artisan prefers working with cherry, sassafras and curly maple woods. His decorated, often whimsical, designs are created for paddlers and art enthusiasts.
“It’s an addictive eye-hand, tactile thing,” Lund explains about the appeal of crafting custom paddles. “I like carving wood. Paddles are sculptures that you can use.”
Lund began carving them in 2000. His first was a traditional style, made from Sitka spruce. It was a gift to his son Max, an Eagle Scout headed for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
“I wanted to give him something for the trip, something nice that fit well. I didn’t like the two-by-four paddles I saw out there,” Lund notes.
His wife and daughter soon requested one. Then other family members called asking. Word spread, but it was a few years before Lund considered it a business.
His unique designs were exhibited and won awards in 2012 and 2013 at Art Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an international art competition. The exposure helped the fledgling business grow. Lund named it The Grand Rapids Paddle Company.
“My inspiration comes from North American Woodland Indians and the folk art of the canoe guides in the Adirondacks,” says Lund. “They carved by the campfire after a day of paddling. They fixed and repaired paddles in their free time.” Lund researches the style of vintage paddles, and many of his designs feature a lollipop-style grip, unique to Adirondack guide paddles.
A fulltime photographer by day, Lund carves an average of 12 paddles a year—he affectionately refers to the Grand Rapids Paddle Company as the smallest paddle maker in the world—each from a single piece of wood. After the paddle is carved Lund paints it—usually a design inspired by folk art or animals. Each paddle takes 40 to 60 hours to complete and sells for $200 to $550.
One memorable paddle was carved for a northern Michigan canoeing couple, he says. They wanted it made from a tree they had cut down. The planks from it had been drying in their barn for a decade.
“It was a crazy maple, old and unique,” Lund declares. He loved working with its many knots and grain. “I laid the pattern out the best I could to make it as pretty as possible.”
Lund’s regard for fine woodworking began at a young age while working at his father’s Detroit business where car parts were made from wood before being cast in metal. He was enamored with the precision tools and found the scrap bin provided a good opportunity. He began developing his skills first by creating toy boats and fishing lures.
“I try to make every paddle so you can use it,” Lund says. “A well designed tool is art. If it feels comfortable in the hand and works well—I think of it as a handsome tool.”
Find Kent Lund online at customcanoepaddle.com.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
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Sure, gear, route and paddling partners are all important considerations when planning a trip—but any seasoned camper will tell you that food can make or break a camping experience. Feasting on homemade chili and freshly baked cornbread after a hard day’s slog will quickly brighten even the rainiest day. On the other hand, a glorious sunset is not quite the same while eating burnt-yet-raw rice or flavorless freeze-dried fare. Food planning and preparation can be one of the most enjoyable parts of a trip—and when done right, the payoff is priceless for everyone involved.
Menu planning can be as complicated or easy as you want to make it. Depending on your trip route and participants, you may wish to dehydrate meals to keep your food pack light, or you may choose to disregard weight and go for maximum fresh ingredients. For most long weekend trips, weight isn’t a concern and you can focus on finding the optimal combo of taste, simplicity and variety.
Remember that activity levels and cooler temperature can have a big impact on your required caloric intake. Nobody wants a horde of hangry paddlers. If in doubt, pack a little bit extra, and go heavier on the carbs than you might at home.
Dinner: Stir fry and coconut rice. If you have a long drive to the access point, prep your veggies in advance for a quick meal when you get into camp. Just make rice, fry up the veggies, and add a protein of your choice. Freeze meat before departure so it stays fresh during your paddle in.
Breakfast: Breakfast wraps. Scramble up fresh eggs and throw them in a whole wheat wrap. Add rice and beans if you want a meal that will stick to your ribs. Go wild with the spice kit and hot sauce.
Lunch: Greek pitas. Combine cheese, cucumbers and tomatoes with a dash of oil and spoon into a wrap. This promises to be a winner on a hot sunny day.
Dinner: Pesto pasta with pine nuts and cheese. Serve with a freshly made carrot slaw on the side.
Breakfast: Apple crisp. Melt butter, then add brown sugar, oats and cinnamon. Serve over freshly stewed (or rehydrated) apples. It’s a breakfast for champions.
Lunch: Mini pizzas. A perfect meal for a cold rainy day. Whip out the stove and don’t skimp on the oil. For perfectly melted cheese, cover the pan with a lid and pour a few drops of water along the edges—the vaporizing effect will melt the cheese and steam your favorite toppings.
Dinner: Burritos. Beans, rice, veggies and salsa. Wrap up the meal with fruit slices and chocolate fondue.
Breakfast: Gourmet oatmeal. Good ol’ oats are made better by adding dried or fresh fruit, nuts and a sprinkle of cinnamon. A quick, warm and filling breakfast.
Lunch: Snack on fresh veggies, wraps, cheese and salami. It’s a nutritious floating lunch as you procrastinate returning home.
Charlotte Jacklein is an experienced guide, chef, and teacher.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
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When Fredrik Norrsell and Nancy Pfeiffer launched into the Alaska wilderness with only a spice kit in their trip pantry, they planned to not just survive but thrive on wild food. Bound for Prince William Sound in late summer, the couple assured friends it would be impossible to starve to death.
A bald eagle perched in the gray branches of an old snag stared intently at the choppy water of the inlet. I sat in my kayak, bobbing with the waves in the pouring rain, jigging up and down with a rhythmic motion of my wrist. The eagle and I were doing the same thing—fishing, waiting, hoping, trusting that something to eat would come our way. A tiny wiggle traveled up the fishing line resting in my fingers. I jerked upward. Nothing. I went back to jigging, staring at the silver sea. Eventually, the eagle flew away. I paddled back to the beach disappointed. Fishing when you are hungry is different than fishing when you are not.
Fredrik and I had begun our two-week trip a few days earlier. We brought with us a slew of fishing gear, a collapsible shrimp pot, a small fish smoker, a garden trowel for digging roots, and an assortment of spices and condiments. The bulk of our sustenance we planned to collect from the land and the sea as we traveled.
Efficient hunting and gathering techniques and the abundance of life in Prince William Sound had allowed the native Chugachmiut and Eyak people to develop a rich, self-sufficient culture. Fredrik and I aspired to thrive in the same way. We wanted to make it as easy on ourselves as possible, so we planned our trial excursion for early August, when millions of salmon would be returning to the streams to spawn and an abundance of wild berries would be hanging in ripe handfuls. We hoped to eat well and have time leftover to enjoy this magical place.
Working as a kayak guide, I was accustomed to paddling 10 to 15 miles a day, 20 feet offshore. Finding a scenic camp and serving my guests a delicious dinner hunted and gathered from an Anchorage grocery store was part of my repertoire. Living off the land would require me to slow down. As we paddled, we scanned the shoreline for berries, jigged for bottom fish at steep drop-offs in the ocean floor, and poked into every small stream to see if it had a salmon run. We averaged less than five miles a day.
As I explored each potential camping beach for fresh edible greens, I found myself experiencing the country at a deeper level than ever before. Small details I never noticed before became important. How quickly do salmonberries ripen? On cloudy days, patches just off the beach along west-facing hillsides allowed me to re-pick every two to three days. I found that I could reliably find the salty spikes of goose-tongue greens a few feet above mean high water level in most protected bays. Although many of the wild woodland edibles I was familiar with—twisted stalk, Arctic dock, wild violet—were bitter and tough by August, avalanche paths, which frequently deposit huge piles of snow at sea level in the winter, provided vegetation months behind in the growing cycle. Slowly, my observational skills became more acute. I wondered how I would see the world if I had come from generations of living off this land as had the Native people of Prince William Sound.
Deep Water Bay had everything I loved in a campsite. Steep, smooth granite walls fell into a deep fiord, glaciated peaks reached toward the skyline, a blonde sand beach beckoned us to camp for a week. But there was a problem. Those vertical rock walls produced picturesque waterfalls but no salmon runs. The thin soil of recently glaciated country is poor in nutrients. The few pockets of wild edibles to be found were perched frighteningly high on small shelves. We suspected that these deep, cold waters would harbor delectable shrimp, but a storm tide two days earlier had stolen our shrimp pot. It was late and we had no choice but to spend a hungry evening in this lovely place. But like the Chugachmiut before us, we could not settle there.
Beach green salads and blueberry desserts made tasty side dishes, but to truly feed ourselves we needed fish. While I was an experienced kayaker, I was a novice angler.
One afternoon just before high tide, Fredrik and I noticed the shiny, round head and huge, dark eyes of a harbor seal bobbing at the mouth of a river. Like us, it had come to fish. I trundled over to the river’s edge in my rain gear and immediately found myself fighting a thrashing five-pound salmon. My reel was set up right-handed; I am a lefty. I watched in horror as the line flew off the reel and tangled into an indecipherable mess. Unwilling to let my dinner get away, I grabbed the thin monofilament with my bare hands and dragged my squirming prize onto shore, where I full-body tackled it. Looking up from the wet grass to make sure my husband had registered my accomplishment, I noticed he had a fish on as well. He was expertly playing it with his fishing rod in hand. We were suddenly, unbelievably rich.
In the Alaskan salmon hierarchy, pinks are near the bottom, outranked by the bright red meat of sockeye salmon and the gigantic size of king salmon, not to mention the hard-fighting, late season silver, which we hoped would arrive soon. While many Alaskan salmon snobs won’t bother fishing for pinks, a freshly caught pink salmon cooked just right makes a delicious meal.
Fredrik’s small, portable fish smoker was the same kind his family used to preserve lake trout caught at their cabin in northern Sweden. Some of our freshly caught fish we would eat hot smoked for dinner that night. The rest we would cold smoke—an overnight soak in a salt, sugar and soy sauce brine, and then a slow, cool smoke over alder chips resulting in a salty, smoky treat that keeps for days.
That evening, as a drowning rain beat loudly on our tarp, we delighted in a dinner of alder-smoked salmon and a salad of oyster leaf, beach lovage, beach greens and wild peas, with blueberries for dessert. Afterwards we leisurely sipped spruce tip tea.
With each successful meal, my fledgling confidence in our ability to live comfortably on the coast was growing. I took pleasure in learning about an aspect of this country I had never explored before. With every bite, this place became more a part of me.
Steamed flounder with red onion and dill, served with beach green and wild blueberry salad and boiled goose tongue greens with garlic. | Feature photo: Fredrik Norrsell
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
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Symbolically and functionally, the canoe is many things to the people of Canada, in addition to it being a major element in Canadian history and our Canadian heritage; for some, it’s also an element of competitive international sport; a vessel to engage with our landscape and connect with nature; a link and connection to personal family memories; and a vehicle for wilderness travel.
Jason Eke, a popular cedar-strip canoe builder and independent film maker, whose online paddling and boatbuilding video’s reach 20,000 views per month has completed the long awaited film Canoe: Icon of the North. Get the full-length film here.
The documentary showcases the points of view of many of Canada’s legends of the paddling community, including:
These well known experts describe why the canoe is important to them, while offering insightful guidance and advice to their audience.
“Icon of the North definitely has a Canadian spin on how the canoe’s a part of our culture. Of course, the canoe is important to people around the world but for my first film I wanted to showcase what the canoe means to me, as a story told by leaders of the paddling community who share my experience in this landscape,” says Eke. “I hope paddlers around the world will identify with the narrative and that the film will actually bridge a gap between recreational and sport, Canadian and international paddlers, because the reason we canoe is something we all share and I think the film captures what it is that we all love.”
From the very start of the film project, film producer/director Jason Eke gained the support of industry leaders like Salus Marine, KEEN Canada, Fox 40, Bending Branches, InReach Canada, Eureka!, Jetboil, the Bureau Group and Rapid Media and has also gained the cooperation of Canadian Canoe Foundation as the film’s title sponsor.
The Canadian Canoe Foundation is a charitable organization that develops watershed-focused environmental education projects and sends Canadian Youth on canoe-trip learning adventures. Canadian Canoe Foundation objectives are to educate communities about sustainability and to provide youth with a ‘hands-on’ education regarding Canada’s natural heritage and the importance of protecting our wilderness areas and waterways.
For weather-weary locals on both coasts, the month of August is known by the disparaging epithet, “Fog-ust.” On the Great Lakes, the “witch of November” brings with her the ferocious late fall storms immortalized in songs and stories. But, setting dangerous weather aside, should you let a forecast for a few drops of rain put the kibosh on your kayak trip?
People have long been preoccupied with weather watching, and none more so than mariners. All that staring at the sky has led to a wealth of colorful weather wisdom.
We have sayings for weather fine and foul.
“A ring around the sun or moon, rain or snow coming soon” describes the halo that can sometimes be seen when a high, uniform cloud layer hints at approaching precipitation.
In a similar vein, “Rain long foretold, long last; short notice, soon past” speaks to the scale of weather in relation to its lead time. The first high clouds of a large low pressure system arrive more than 24 hours before the rain. Once the showers start, expect to keep your rain jacket handy for just as long. On the other hand, the anvil clouds of summer storms are fast forming and the deluge is over just as quickly.
Perhaps the best known weather rhyme is, “Red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.” Clouds in the northern mid-latitudes move from west to east, so a red sky at sunrise foretells inclement weather, while a red sky at night means the western horizon is clear, indicating fine weather is arriving.
There is an equally plentiful supply of traditional wisdom about the wind.
Mariners have long predicted improving or deteriorating weather based on wind direction: “Wind from the north, fair weather shall come forth; wind from the west is best; wind from the south brings rain in its mouth; wind from the east is a beast.”
And don’t forget this illustrative nugget: “Mares’ tails and fish scales make tall ships carry short sails.” Scant wisps of high cirrus clouds and the dappled texture of cirrocumulus—the earliest signs of wet and windy weather—arrive when the sun is still shining and the breeze light.
Notice none of this advice mentions not going outside. In the words of early twentieth-century sailor and theologian, John A. Shedd, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
Leave the doom saying to the talking heads on The Weather Network. Only viewers dulled by looking down at phones and computer screens, rather than up at the sky, and lulled by the artificial comfort of climate-controlled office buildings and shopping centers, could accept such a preposterous suggestion.
Here’s my own weather wisdom: turn off the TV, pack your dry bags and a good paddling jacket, and go anyway. Shorten your sails, take warning and be sensible, but don’t cancel your trip just because it’s wet or cloudy, cold or windy.
With good gear, you’ll hardly notice bad weather. And even if you do end up damp, chilled and tent-bound, don’t despair. Looking back, it’s the rounds of cards played under the tarp, the storms weathered in wind-tossed tents, and the sound of raindrops hammering still waters that I remember most vividly.
“Misery is transformed by memory,” a friend told me after we shared a particularly soggy and difficult trip. It’s true. An accurate 30-day forecast might have tempted me to stay home that August, but where’s the adventure in that?
A weather forecast with a few water droplets won’t hurt you—or your kayak. | Feature photo: Sourabh Yadav/Pixabay
It was two a.m. and a near-gale was howling. The bad news was that Paul Caffyn, scrambling for his glasses and headlamp, needed to exit the tent quickly. The good news—if you could call it that—was that there was no need to unzip the door, because a brown bear’s paw had just created another very large exit hole in the fabric.
Startled by Caffyn’s yell, the bear tripped over his kayak and ran off, leaving Caffyn alone on the shores of Alaska’s Bristol Bay with a severely compromised tent and over 1,000 miles yet to paddle to Nome.
Twenty-five years ago, Paul Caffyn was in the midst of one of sea kayaking’s most impressive journeys. While the New Zealand native is best known for his 1982 circumnavigation of Australia— repeated by Freya Hoffmeister in 2009—nobody’s ever tried to repeat his 1989–91 paddle from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, around Alaska, to Inuvik, on the Arctic Coast of the Yukon Territory.
“Many think of Australia as his crowning achievement, but I regard the Alaska trip as his pinnacle,” says longtime paddling partner Conrad Edwards.
Caffyn planned the expedition amid post-trip doldrums after his 1985 circumnavigation of Japan. He likened the purposelessness that followed an expedition to post-natal depression, “Once the elusive goal had been attained, there was nothing else really to strive for.”
As an antidote, he began poring over the world atlas. Alaska, where the traditional baidarka kayak was born, seemed like a nostalgic homecoming for a paddler.
The tracing of Alaska’s coast—a sea journey of 4,700 miles—was initially conceived as a single- season trip. But the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989 forced Caffyn to stop at the north end of Alaska’s panhandle, and the journey was recast into two more summers: from Elfin Cove to Nome, and then across the Arctic Coast to Inuvik.
The first crux was a 425-mile stretch from Cape Spencer near Glacier Bay to Cordova in Prince William Sound. Exposed to the full brunt of the Gulf of Alaska with only three protected landings, this coast had been kayaked just once since 1900. Landing in the surf, Caffyn’s yellow Nordkapp was tossed end-over-end and he was ripped from the cockpit. He managed to grab his kayak seconds before the undertow pulled it out to sea.
Caffyn carried no form of communication. He shared his plans with only a few people, and those who knew were sworn to secrecy. Caffyn wanted to avoid the hassles from maritime authorities he’d encountered paddling around Japan and Tasmania. His only safeguard was a phone call to a friend in Ketchikan when he picked up each of his food drops at small post offices along the coast.
Add long miles, pre-GPS fogbound crossings, close encounters with whales and walrus, sea ice, storms of Alaskan magnitude and an ursine- shredded tent and you have more stories than most adventurous paddlers will acquire in a lifetime.
“I have always considered myself as having modest ability, but better than average motivation. And I feel so exceedingly bloody lucky that I was there at the right time to kick off the golden age of expedition sea kayaking,” Caffyn, then 66, told Australian Geographic in 2014.
“He saw in the sea kayak a new vehicle for exploration and immediately started pushing the boundaries of its use and then inventing and demonstrating new boundaries,” Edwards reflects.
Caffyn’s minimalist, solo, unplugged expeditions are both an invitation to dream of the simplicity of a bygone age of wilderness exploration, and to dream of our own possible horizons.
A quarter-century later, another inconceivable expedition has concluded. As I write, Freya Hoffmeister is paddling back into Buenos Aires after four years and 16,000 miles around South America—another trip unlikely to be repeated any time soon.
Neil Schulman celebrates kayaking’s diverse heritage in Reflections.
Paul Caffyn’s new book on his Alaska journey is due later this year. His Australia and South Island New Zealand expeditions are recounted in The Dreamtime Voyage and Obscured by Waves.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Adventure Kayak magazine.
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This article was first published in the Fall 2015 issue of Rapid Magazine. 
