front cover of Alabama Canoe Rides and Float Trips
Alabama Canoe Rides and Float Trips
John Foshee
University of Alabama Press, 1986
A detailed guide to 102 canoe trips on the Cahaba River and 40 other creeks and rivers within the state

John Foshee’s popular and informative Alabama Canoe Rides and Float Trips has been a favorite of canoeing enthusiasts since 1975, providing a detailed guide to 102 canoe trips on the Cahaba River and 40 other creeks and rivers within the state. The trips highlighted in the book range from 3½ to 14 miles in length, with difficulty factors varying from leisurely float trips to Class 4 rapids.

This handy guide will assist beginning and expert canoeists in the selection of and preparation for a variety of float experiences. The author gives suggestions for river safety and makes recommendations for equipment. In addition, he points out major danger areas and obstacles that may be encountered and includes information on river access and use of topographical maps. An appendix contains brief descriptions of the rides, including their put-ins and take-outs, and follows the general format of the individual trip descriptions.
 
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Barren Grounds
The Story of the Tragic Moffatt Canoe Trip
Skip Pessl
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
In 1955 Arthur Moffatt led an expedition consisting of young college students and recent graduates to the Inuit lands of Nunavut, Canada, to follow the path of the 1893 Tyrrell expedition and to film and photograph the group’s progress. The expedition, a 900-mile epic journey across the Barren Lands of Arctic Canada, has stirred controversy and criticism for over fifty years. The trip has been variously described as “the pioneering venture in modern recreational canoe travel” and as “an excellent example of how not to conduct a canoe trip.” Delays took their toll on the adventurers, exhausted by the seemingly endless paddling through unknown rivers and lakes, the trek across the windswept tundra, and torment by voracious insects. Threatened with diminishing food reserves and increasingly harsh weather, the members of the expedition were forced to travel with greater speed and less caution, and ultimately a fatal mistake was made. Two of the canoes capsized, dumping four men into the frigid waters. Moffatt, the leader, died of exposure. It took the survivors ten days of arduous travel with minimum food and equipment to reach the safety of the Hudson’s Bay Company post. Barren Grounds features passages from the journals of two young Moffatt party members and excerpts about the 1893 expedition of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, along with entries from the journal of Art Moffatt himself. Part cautionary tale, part nail-biting adventure, the book will appeal to outdoorsmen and armchair adventurers alike.
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Canoeing the Delaware River
Letcher, Gary
Rutgers University Press, 1997
Canoeing the Delaware River provides a mile-by-mile account of the Delaware's course from where the East and West Branches meet in Hancock, New York, two hundred miles downstream to tidewater at Trenton, New Jersey. The book describes rapids, access areas, and points of interest in detail. It is an invaluable resource to both the novice out for an afternoon paddle and the adventurer on a ten-day trip. This completely revised and updated edition provides new maps, guides to river outfitters, campgrounds, information sources on river conditions, and new photographs.In addition to guiding the way, Canoeing the Delaware River portrays the people, places, and events associated with the river from its colorful past through present times. Gary Letcher also includes information on canoe safety and environmental concerns.
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Crossing the Driftless
A Canoe Trip through a Midwestern Landscape
Lynne Diebel
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
The Driftless Area is the land the glaciers missed, an ancient landscape of bluffs, ridgetops, and steep valleys that long ago was a seabed. Covering much of southwestern Wisconsin, its contours were deeply carved from bedrock, not by ice but by many rivers.
            Crossing the Driftless is both a traveler’s tale and an exploration of this dramatic environment, following the streams of geologic and human history. Lynne Diebel and her husband, Bob, crossed the Driftless Area by canoe, journeying 359 river miles (and six Mississippi River locks and five portages) from Faribault, Minnesota, where her family has a summer home on Cedar Lake, to their Wisconsin home in Stoughton, one block from the Yahara River. Traveling by river and portage, they paddled downstream on the Cannon and Mississippi rivers and upstream on the Wisconsin River, in the tradition of voyageurs. Lynne tells the story of their trip, but also the stories of the rivers they canoed and the many tributaries whose confluences they passed.

Finalist, Travel, Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year Awards

Honorable mention, Nonfiction book, Council for Wisconsin Writers

Winner, Recreation/Sports/Travel, Midwest Book Awards

Best books for public & secondary school libraries from university presses, American Library Association
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Deep Travel
In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack
David K. Leff
University of Iowa Press, 2009
In the hot summer of 2004, David Leff floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. Fortified with Thoreau’s observations as revealed in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Leff brought his own concept of mindful deep travel to these same New England waterways. His first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.

How we see depends on where we are in our lives and with whom we travel. Leff chose his companions wisely. In consecutive journeys his neighbor and friend Alan, a veteran city planner; his son Josh, an energetic eleven-year-old; and his sweetheart Pamela, a compassionate professional caregiver, added their perspectives to Leff’s own experiences as a government official in natural resources policy. Not so much sight seeing as sight seeking, together they explored a geography of the imagination as well as the rich natural and human histories of the rivers and their communities.

The heightened awareness of deep travel demands that we immerse ourselves fully in places and realize that they exist in time as well as space. Its mindfulness enriches the experience and makes the voyager worthy of the journey. Leff’s intriguing, contemplative deep travel along these historic rivers presents a methodology for exploration that will enrich any trip.

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Distant Fires
Duluth to Hudson Bay
Scott Anderson
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
"The waves on Lake Superior nearly splattered them all over the cliffs, and mosquitoes almost ate them alive in the Boundary Waters. Halfway through the three-month trip, they buried their underwear. But who needs underwear when you’re 22 years old and living out the adventure of a boyhood dream?" —St. Paul Pioneer Press

"Distant Fires, a true-life adventure, describes a 1,700-mile canoe trip from Duluth to York Factory on Hudson Bay. Anderson and a companion retraced the paddles taken by Eric Sevareid and a companion almost sixty years earlier. Their trials and tribulations, plus Anderson’s sense of humor, make the trip fun in book form. Pen-and-ink illustrations are by noted Minnesota wildlife artist Les Kouba." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Distant Fires is a voyage of discovery. Scott Anderson is an inquisitive traveler, and when he sees something that piques his interest, he stops for a chat. He also has a marvelous eye for the natural world that surrounds him in his summerlong journey. He is a natural-born writer." —Duluth News Tribune

"Some of [Anderson’s] phrasing is very happy indeed: ‘the resting place of the rivers.’ I wish I had written that." —Eric Sevareid
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Exploring the Boundary Waters
A Trip Planner and Guide to the BWCAW
Daniel Pauly
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
With more than 200,000 visitors annually, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is among the most alluring wilderness areas in the country, unique because it is most often explored by canoe. Comprised of more than one million acres, the BWCAW is an exceptional combination of expansive wilderness, abundant wildlife, and fascinating natural and human history. Exploring the Boundary Waters is the most comprehensive trip planner to the BWCAW, giving travelers an overview of each entry point into the wilderness area as well as detailed descriptions of more than one hundred specific routes - including a ranking of their difficulty level and maps that feature the major waterways, portages, and the designated campsites. The book is crafted so that readers can design their own route through the almost inexhaustible network of lakes and streams. Daniel Pauly, Boundary Waters expert, worked with the U.S. Forest Service, the Minnesota DNR, and local outfitters to gather information about how to obtain a permit, the rules and regulations of the park, safety tips, and how to help maintain the ecological integrity of the wilderness. As engaging as it is informative, Exploring the Boundary Waters not only contributes advice on the pros and cons of each route, but also brings the reader a natural and historical context for the journey by offering insight into the pictographs, mining sites, logging railroads, and ruins one may encounter throughout his or her expedition. With its accessible and personal style, Exploring the Boundary Waters is the perfect guide for anyone - novice or seasoned veteran - arranging a trip to the BWCAW. A companion Web site, http://www.boundarywatersguide.com, presents useful information that can be downloaded for planning a trip, including gear lists, overview maps, and route updates.
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Liminal Zones
Where Lakes End and Rivers Begin
Kim Trevathan
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
     After the death of his paddling companion, a German shepherd–labrador retriever mix named Jasper, Kim Trevathan began a series of solitary upstream kayaking quests in search of what he calls “liminal zones,” transitional areas where dammed reservoirs give way to the current of the rivers that feed them. For four years he scoured the rivers and lakes of America, where environmentally damaging, and now decaying, man-made structures have transformed the waterways. In this thoughtful work, he details his upriver adventures, describing the ecological and aesthetic differences between a dammed river and a free-flowing river and exploring the implications of what liminal zones represent—a reassertion of pure, unadulterated nature over engineered bodies of water.
     Trevathan began by exploring the rivers and creeks of his childhood: the Blood River and Clarks River in western Kentucky. He soon ventured out to the Wolf River, the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, and other waterways in Tennessee. In 2008, he looped around the country with trips to Indiana’s Tippecanoe River, Montana’s Clearwater River, Oregon’s Deschutes and Rogue Rivers, and Colorado’s Dolores River, as well as adventures on such southeastern rivers as the Edisto, the Tellico, and the Nantahala. To Trevathan, paddling upstream became a sort of religion, with a vaporous deity that kept him searching. Each excursion yielded something unexpected, from a near-drowning in the Rogue River to a mysterious fog bank that arose across the Nantahala at midday.
     Throughout Liminal Zones, Trevathan considers what makes certain places special, why some are set aside and protected, why others are not, and how free-flowing streams remain valuable to our culture, our history, and our physical and spiritual health. This contemplative chronicle of his journeys by water reveals discoveries as varied and complex as the rivers themselves.
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Little Whale
A Story of the Last Tlingit War Canoe
Roy A. Peratrovich, Jr.
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Keet, a ten-year-old Tlingit Indian boy, stows away for a voyage on his father’s canoe . . . and soon finds himself caught in the middle of a wild seastorm. The story carries him far from his home village, and when he makes land, he winds up right in the middle of a dangerous dispute between two Indian clans. The story of how he copes with these surprises and extricates himself from danger is dramatic and unforgettable.
            And it’s mostly true. Roy Peratrovich here builds a wonderful children’s tale on the bones of a story his own grandfather passed down. His accompanying illustrations bring the people and landscapes of Alaska—to say nothing of the adventures!—to stunning life, drawing young readers into a long-gone time when the whims of nature and man could suddenly test a boy’s courage.
 
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Making the Carry
The Lives of John and Tchi-Ki-Wis Linklater
Timothy Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.

John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.

Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.

Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.

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North American Canoe Country
The Classic Guide to Canoe Technique
Calvin Rutstrum
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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A Paddler's Guide to the Delaware River
Kayaking, Canoeing, Rafting, Tubing
Letcher, Gary
Rutgers University Press, 2012

When Henry Hudson explored the Delaware River in 1609, he dubbed it “one of the finest, best, and pleasantest rivers in the world.” Today, those same qualities make the Delaware one of the most popular rivers for recreational use in the United States. Although in places a near-wilderness, the Delaware is easily accessible to millions of residents. On any summer day there may be thousands of people rushing down its exciting rapids or lazing through its serene eddies.

A Paddler’s Guide to the Delaware River is an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to experience the Delaware River in a kayak, canoe, raft, or tube—or, for that matter, an automobile or an armchair. Reading the book is like travelling down the river with an experienced guide. It charts the non-tidal Delaware 200 miles from Hancock, New York, to Trenton, New Jersey, describing access points, rapids, natural features, villages, historical sites, campgrounds, outfitters, and restaurants. The Delaware comes alive as the author introduces some of the people, places, events, and  controversies that have marked the river from earliest times to the present day.
Completely revised, the third edition offers:

  • An overview of the river including watershed, history, place names, paddlecraft, safety, and fishing.
  • The River Guide: ten sections that can each be paddled in one day (about 20 miles), with a mile-by-mile account of rapids, access, natural features, historic sites, and other features.
  • All new maps, with names for virtually every rapid, eddy, and other river feature, plus detailed diagrams for routes through even the most severe rapids.
  • Features in the River Guide highlight the people, events, natural history, and communities that define the river experience, such as Tom Quick, the infamous “avenger of the Delaware”; the mysterious migration of eels, the battle over Tocks Island Dam; and many others.
  • Appendices of Important Contacts, Outfitters and Campgrounds, River Trip Checklists, and more.

Whether you are a novice out for an afternoon float, a seasoned adventurer on an overnight expedition, or a resident fascinated by the lore of the Delaware Valley, this book is an invaluable guide.

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Paddling The Tennessee River
A Voyage On Easy Water
Kim Trevathan
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
In late August 1998, Kim Trevathan and his dog, Jasper, set out by canoe on a long, slow trip down the 652 miles of the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio. Trevathan wanted to experience the river in its entirety, from Knoxville’s narrow, winding channel, which flows past rocky bluffs, to the wide-open waters of Kentucky Lake at its lower end.

Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee’s banks. He crossed the path of the explorer Meriwether Lewis along the Natchez Trace, noted the sites of Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War battles, and passed Hiwassee Island, the spot where a teenaged runaway named Sam Houston lived with Cherokee Chief Jolly.

Trevathan also came to know the modern river’s dwellers, including a towboat pilot, two couples who traded in their landlocked homes for life on the river, a campground owner, and a meteorologist for NASA. He placed his life in the hands of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lock operators as he and Jasper navigated the river’s nine dams.

Paddling the Tennessee River is a powerful travel narrative that captures the river’s wild, turbulent, and defiant past and confronts what it has become—an overused and overdeveloped series of lakes. But first and foremost, the book is the story of a man and his dog, riding low enough to smell the water and to discover the promise of a slow river running through the southern heartland.

The Author: Kim Trevathan, who earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Alabama, works as a new media writer and producer and writes a column for the Maryville Daily Times. His essays and short stories have been published in The Distillery, New Millennium Writings, The Texas Review, New Delta Review, and Under the Sun. He lives in Rockford, Tennessee.


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The Politics of the Canoe
Bruce Erickson
University of Manitoba Press, 2021

front cover of River Runners' Guide To Utah and Adjacent Areas
River Runners' Guide To Utah and Adjacent Areas
Gary C Nichols
University of Utah Press, 1986

A fully revised and updated edition of Gary Nichols’ widely used guide to river running in Utah. Major changes have occurred on Big and Little Cottonwood Creeks, which have many new drops with dangerous hydraulics. This edition accounts for these and other alterations in the state’s waterways over the past fifteen years. Also, several of the original river access points are now on private land. Alternative access points are presented and users are alerted to the necessity of requesting permission. All this and much more will once again make A River Runners’ Guide to Utah and Adjacent Areas the one source for vital and reliable information on more than ninety river trips for beginner and expert alike. It includes:

-Over 90 river trips with descriptions and maps
-Location of access and take-out points
-Instructions for all skill levels
-Ratings of all waterways by levels of difficulty
-Identification of danger areas and obstacles

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Trails of Central Arkansas
A Guide to Central Arkansas' Land and Water Trails
Johnnie Chamberlin
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012
Chock-full of informative detail,
Trails of Central Arkansas delivers:
 
*  Sixty trails in 36 parks or locations from Benton and Bryant to Cabot, from Wrightsville to Conway
*  Color maps of every trail
*  GPS coordinates for every trailhead
*  Color-coded distinctions between paved and unpaved trails
*  Level of difficulty ratings
*  Scenery Scores
*  Top-ten lists: Most Scenic, Trails for Kids, and Trails for Solitude
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Up on the River
People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi
Madson, John
University of Iowa Press, 1985
Up on the River is John Madson’s loving and often hilarious tribute to the people, animal life, and places of the Upper Mississippi. Madson’s Upper Mississippi is the part “between the saints,” from St. Louis to St. Paul, and where for thirty years he explored the bright waters of the upper reaches of the mighty river itself as well as the tangled multitude of sloughs, cuts, and side channels that wander through its wooded islands and floodplain forests.
 “Some of my best time on the River has been in the company of game wardens, biologists, commercial fishermen, clammers, trappers, hunters, and a smelly, mud-smeared coterie of river rats in general, and my views of the River are far more likely to reflect theirs than those of the transportation industry,” Madson writes of his thirty-year acquaintance with the Mississippi. Traveling mainly by canoe and johnboat, he tells of encounters between archetypal commercial fishermen and archetypal game wardens over hot fish chowder, fishing for crappies in the tops of submerged trees and for walleyes amid gale force winds, nesting and migrating herons and ducks and eagles, the histories of river logging and pearling and button making, and towboats and barges and the lives of the “ramstugenous” people who move freight on the river.
 
Learning about the Upper Mississippi via the wry tutelage of John Madson, who discovered that “whenever I am out on a river some of its freeness rubs off on me,” readers of this classic book will also come under the spell of this freeness.
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