10 Best Adventure Paddling Books
5. Where Rivers Run: A 6,000-Mile Exploration of Canada by Canoe, by Joanie and Gary McGuffin
Crossing Canada by canoe is not your typical honeymoon destination, but for the McGuffins it seemed a reasonable way to start a marriage. The couple packed a wide range of scenery and human interest into their two-year expedition from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in a great clockwise sweep along the rivers and lakes of Canada to the Arctic on the Beaufort Sea. This remarkable account lends credence to the adage that life is an adventure only for the adventurous.
The bow of the canoe sliced through a moonlit path of sparkling silver, while overhead the Northern Lights glowed and glimmered in undulating curtains of viridescent waves. For three tireless hours, we swept through this dreamland. Then the sky began to melt from deep velvet blue through purple to soft pink until finally a fiery orange sun burst over the horizon. The moon faded quickly with the brightening sky. It was daytime again on Lake Winnipeg.
6. Travels with a Kayak, by Whit Deschner
Whit Deschner is a paddler possessed of an irreverent and outrageous sense of humor. Some would say he's just possessed, period. His unusual travels around the world with a kayak have thrown him into all manner of strange encounters. Much of this cross-cultural hilarity is so ludicrous that you know it has to be true. But Deschner is even-handed, and no one is spared - least of all himself.
At least now we had the comforting knowledge that from here on down Dave had run the river, and in our possession was his detailed account. However, turning to it for the first time, we discovered that his advice was written on a single piece of paper and that it revealed two unexplained numbers, a 2 and a 5. Considerable discussion ensued as to the interpretation of these numbers. Someone said the river must be a class 2 except for the 5s. Someone else claimed that the class 5 would take 2 hours to portage. Another thought there were 2 class 5s. And I said that if you multiply 2 times 5 and divide it by the number of members in the party, add to this all the loose change in everybody's pockets, and multiply this by the amount of beers in Pakistan, you'll arrive at the average IQ of the group. My point of view, however, was discounted as being sarcastic.
7. The Lonely Land, by Sigurd F. Olson
This is the memorable and moving description of a 500-mile trip on the Churchill River in eastern Saskatchewan by six friends in 1955 in three wood-and-canvas canoes. Naturalist Sigurd Olson does a fine job of recounting the memories and journals of the early voyageurs, and he is pleased to note that not much has changed in the intervening centuries. Most poignant is how intensely this jovial band of paddlers adapts to the magnificent wilderness that unfurls before them.
There are few places left on the North American continent where men can still see the country as it was before Europeans came and know some of the challenges and freedoms of those who saw it first, but in the Canadian Northwest it can still be done. A thousand miles northwest of Lake Superior are great free rivers, lakes whose horizons disappear, countless unnamed waterways, and ridges and forested valleys still unknown. Most of it is part of the Canadian Shield, an enormous outpouring of granitic lava that extends from the bleak coasts of Labrador in the east, almost to the Mackenzie River valley in the west, and then on into the Arctic North.
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