-
Spring Kayaking
The ice just won’t leave. It’s going. At the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Sawbill Outfitters up the Sawbill Trail from Tofte reports that the ice thickness has dropped from 27 inches to 22 inches from the 2nd of May until the 5th. At that rate, assuming a linear ice melt, the pace of ice melt puts ice out on the 18th of May. That’s when Devil Track Lake, the lake I currently sort of live on, went out last year. We broke a record. I wonder if it’ll happen again. There’s something about this time of year, especially this year with the 1 to 2 feet…
-
How to Pick the Perfect Campsite
At the end of a long, hard day of kayaking or canoeing finding the perfect campsite can boost your morale and make the day’s effort feel more rewarding. With limited daylight and no desire to paddle further, and a just okay campsite at your bow, it’s tempting to paddle on just to see what’s around the corner. Follow the advice on this How to Pick the Perfect Campsite flow chart, you’ll find the perfect campsite every time you start to look. Click the image to view it larger.
-
Press Release: Attempt to Circumnavigate the World Suspended
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Unattempt to Circumnavigate the World by Kayak Suspended Grand Marais, Minnesota (April 1, 2013) — Today expedition paddler Bryan Hansel indefinately suspended his attempt to attempt a never before attempted kayaking route in the pursuit of becoming the first person in the world to circumnavigate the world by kayak. He was attempting the solo expedition to bring attention to the slowest growing religion in the world, The Church of the Latter-Day Dude. The expedition was set to start on the Great Lakes, travel to England via Greenland and Iceland. Then journey to the Mediterranean Sea to the Suez Channel and around India, with a short jaunt below…
-
Winter Canoe Paintings
Each winter photographers and painters from around the Midwest gather at the YMCA canoe camp Menogyn for the Grand Marais Art Colony’s Winter Arts Festival. This year, the art’s festival ran from January 25th to February 1st. During the week, plein air painters, Neil Sherman, Matt Kania and Tom McGregor painted canoes racked for the winter at the camp. The contrast between the white snow and blues, reds and greens of the canoes popped off the wall during the show that runs all of February at the Grand Marais art colony. (Featured painting by Tom McGregor.) I caught up with each of the painters and asked them a few questions: PaddlingLight: Canoes,…
-
PaddlingLight was Philosophical about Paddling in 2012
PaddlingLight was Philosophical about Paddling in 2012! In past years, I’ve tried to stay much more focused on practical issues about building kayaks and canoe, kayak and canoe tripping skills and general how-to articles, but for some reason in 2012, I got philosophical about wilderness and paddling (Perhaps because wilderness is now under extreme threat in the U.S. This is the first congress to NOT protect any additional land in the U.S. in modern times). One of the nice things about blogging is that I set the sites agenda, and I usually set it on a week by week basis that depends on what I’m thinking about at the time, but as…
-
This vs That in Kayaking
Over on PaddlingLight’s Facebook page, I posed a question and some thoughts about paddling sponsorship. Basically, I noticed that more sponsored paddlers are getting sponsored without having to go out on expeditions. I wondered what that does to the look and appeal of paddling (from a manufacturer’s standpoint, it may make sense this way: you get your gear out to the influencers; they influence the hard core paddlers who buy your gear; the hard core show it off to their friends who buy it; and then it trickles down from there). My thought was that I’d rather that sea kayaking look like National Geographic instead of some kind of extreme sport. That…
-
Living in the Last Scrap of the Golden Age of Wilderness Paddling
After reading an article on the potential sale of more than 1,800 hectares and 30 kilometers of undeveloped Lake Superior shoreline potentially to developers who plan to develop the untouched bays, it occurred to me that we, as in the kayakers and canoeist alive right now, might be living in the last scrap of the golden age of wilderness paddling in the Great Lakes basin. And, I wonder if there’s any stopping the development of the remaining undeveloped areas on the Great Lakes. And, I wonder, even with the current protections, if those will remain as more people desire their own little piece of the big lakes. Wilderness paddling in…
-
Learn to Kayak Because Zombies Can’t Swim
I’ve gotten enough requests for the Learn to Kayak Because Zombies Can’t Swim t-shirt that I’ve decided to offer it from a print-on-demand t-shirt company. This means that if you didn’t get a chance to buy a Kayaker vs. Zombie t-shirt during the first run, you can get one now. You also have several options for the designs as well. I’ve included t-shirts that are similar to the original versions which have the North Shore Expeditions logo on the front and the Learn to Kayak Because Zombies Can’t Swim design (pictured below) on the back. I’m also offering t-shirts with just the Kayaker vs. Zombie design on the front. Even…
-
The Joy of Canoe
The ripples slap against the sea green hull of my canoe and the light wind rumbles in my ears as I paddle towards the clam, leeside of Devil Track Lake. Kneeling in the center of the canoe, leaning the boat to make it easy to reach the water, I take strokes only on one side of the hull. A bow draw blended with a forward blended with a “J” keeps the canoe going straight despite the wind. When my attention wanders, the wind changes my course and I have to pull harder on the draw and push harder on the pry until the canoe reclaims the correct direction. Whether I…
-
Dreaming About Belcher Islands Kayaking
Today, I was going to write an essay about my view on rough water sea kayaking and whether or not this specific subset of sea kayaking really fits in with my view of what sea kayaking is and whether or not the continued emphasis on rough water paddling is good for the sport, but I got sidetracked, probably for the better, by the Google maps on GeoGarage while trying to identify several lights that I saw last night from across Lake Superior. What I saw on Google maps that blew my mind was the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, and the cool thing: the islands have a history of kayaking that goes…
-
Save the Boundary Waters From Cell Towers Letter Writing Campaign
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) is one of only two federally designation canoe wilderness areas in the United States of America. It’s also America’s most used federally designated wilderness area, an area that Americans set aside to protect and preserve under two separate pieces of bipartisan federal legislation. It consists over 1,000 lakes connected by portage trails within a million acres of roadless wilderness. It also has primitive campsites that allow canoeists the possibility of paddling for a month without seeing anything man-made intruding. Aldo Leopold argued that outdoor recreation is valuable directly proportional to the experience’s intensity, and “to the degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life.” And it’s this reason that…
-
Two Pictures: Tettegouche State Park and Pigeon Bay Kayaking Trips
This summer, I started a new kayak guiding company and am one of the few Grand Marais kayaking companies. One of the reasons that I started this company was because I love paddling and wanted to share it with more people and many of the locations that I guide weren’t being guided anymore since a friend of mine sold his business several years ago. In Grand Marais, no one was guiding the Fall River Trip. No one was guiding the full Tettegouche State Park trip, although two places do half the trip, and no one was doing Pigeon River. Additionally, no guides in the area were running multi-day trips along…
-
Photo: Have a Good Caption?
I took this of Andrea Knepper at the Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium. Clearly she’s having fun, but what’s she doing? Do you have a good caption for this photo?
-
Three Waves from Safety
Today, I had the most exciting rescue of the year. In the morning, I left the harbor with someone who had kayaked before. We went out on the lake into about 1.5 feet of chop and swung around a point into a protected bay where we paddled around for an hour or so. During our time paddling, the wind picked up slightly to about 10 knots with gusts to 15 knots. On our way back, we had a choice to make. We could either portage from the bay back into the harbor which would avoid the rough water or we could paddle back around the point and into the choppy…
-
The Weitzel Tragedy: While the rewards may be great, you might not like the consequences
Kayaker Robert Weitzel passed away tragically on Lake Superior on June 17, 2012. He was attempting to kayak around Lake Superior. At one of the entrances of Yellowstone National Park, they collect the innocent and naive questions that some of the visitors ask when they come to the park, such as “When do the rangers pen up the bison for the evening” or “When do they turn off Old Faithful?” They also collect stories of some of the dangerous things that tourists do there. Years ago a friend of mine related to me an incident that she witnessed as a park employee. A park visitor placed his toddler on the…
Or if you use a RSS Feed Reader subscribe via our RSS Feed.