I Love Paddling

The typical weekend canoe-camper probably doesn’t think of her activity in Olympic terms. But, canoeing is indeed a sport on the Olympic program, even if the action doesn’t exactly resemble the experience of the rank-and-file paddling set. Olympic canoeing includes flatwater and whitewater disciplines. The flatwater events are contested over 500 and 1,000 meter distances […]

A fire burns, a forest grows, a forest changes. In Canoeing.com’s latest Nature & Environment section feature story, contributor Alissa Johnson examines the ecological impact of last year’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness fires. Two blazes left 165 square miles of contiguous forest burned. The 2007 fires engulfed trees toppled in the 1999 BWCAW “blowdown” […]

The Minnesota news web site MinnPost recently noted THIS article in Wilderness Medicine that compared various water purification techniques commonly used by canoe campers and other wilderness travelers. The winner, according to MinnPost’s Mark Neuzil … boiling your drinking water.While each technique had its drawbacks — boiling’s were that it’s time consuming and inconvenient — […]

Carolyn Szczepanski, a reporter for Kansas City’s The Pitch, a weekly free newspaper, recently followed the action of the Missouri River 340 Canoe and Kayak Race. The 340-mile-long race starts in Kansas City, on the western edge of Missouri, and races to St. Charles, on the State’s eastern side, near the Missouri Rivers’ confluence with […]

We enjoyed a recent column by Minnesota’s Duluth News-Tribune outdoor writer Sam Cook so much, we wanted to share it with you. Cook, on a canoe trip in Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, climbs out of his tent on a moonlit night and steps into a different way of looking at the world. “It was possible, standing there, to imagine the […]

They nearly won it in 2003.  They did win it in 2004.  One of them won last year, too. And this year, at the 61st Weyerhaeuser AuSable River Canoe Marathon, Andy Triebold of Spring Arbor, Michigan and Steve Lajoie of Mirabel, Quebec, the pre-race favorites going into the 120-mile overnight canoe race, won it again.  The pair […]

If the names of Northern Saskatchewan’s rivers — the Churchill, the Clearwater, the Fond du Lac, the Sturgeon-weir — aren’t enough to beckon you to paddle on them, then perhaps the photos in Robin and Arlene Karpan’s book will finally send you down one in a canoe. The couple’s Northern Saskatchewan Canoe Country (Parkland Publishing, […]

Andy Triebold and Steve Lajoie paddled into the favorites’ position for this weekend’s Weyerhaeuser AuSable Canoe Marathon with a win in Spike’s Challenge, a preliminary race held over the first fraction of the AuSable Canoe Marathon’s 120 mile course. The victory dubbed Triebold of Spring Arbor, Michigan and Lajoie of Mirabel, Quebec the team to beat for 61st AuSable […]