A Long Long Paddle

by Erik Olsen on

Here is the tale of an epic paddling trip. Paddler Scott Miller,
with the help of two friends, took his canoe some 2,250 miles this past summer, drawing strokes as he traversed
numerous rivers and lakes from St. Cloud to Hudson Bay, Canada. He was replicating a similar trip taken 75 years ago by
a couple of Minnesotan teenagers (one of whom became quite famous) named Walter Port and Eric Sevareid (the famous
one).

The story of the journey can be found on their Web site,
Hudsonbayexpedition.com. During the trip they used a laptop, solar
panels and a satellite phone in order to maintain a connectn with the real world. Or at least the wired one. Very
cool.

Photo of the Day: (11/12/05)

by Erik Olsen on

I check the gadling Flickr site just about every day, and I am always psyched to see great new photos uploaded.
Lately, a guy named Buck
Forester has been posting photos to the site and they are…well, astounding.
Today’s POTD is one of several
retina-exploding pictures by Mr. Forester. He captions it “Taken from near Paoha Island in Mono Lake on a 3-day
solo paddling adventure in winter. This is looking west towards the Sierra crest late afternoon.” I’d love to hear
more from Buck…does he shoot professionally?  How does he get such amazing color? Etc.

One for the Road: Amazon Extreme

by Erik Olsen on

Despite first impressions,

Amazon Extreme is not the name of a new marketing program by the online bookseller. It is the name of the first
book by Colin Angus about a trip taken by him and two of his friends about rafting down (and almost dying on) the
Amazon river. They made the trip from the headwaters to the mouth in September 1999, and had several close calls
due, mostly, to lack of planning and negligence. But such things are often the stuff of tragedy which is, after all,
the soul of humor, and the book is said to deliver ample doses of both. Because of a personal fascination with the
Amazon River, I have added this book to my current reading list.

Dealing with Hypothermia

by Erik Olsen on

I attended a meeting recently here in Manhattan at the
New York Kayak Company to learn a bit about the effects of hypothermia. The
discussion was led by Jim Tsung, MD, who had many interesting things to say about the effects of cold water on the
human body. Probably the most interesting take-away was that survivability probabilities in cold water (say, less than
50 degrees) is actually quite a bit higher than I had thought. When I was paddling in Alaska a few years ago, our guide
said that if you fell in the water, you’d only have a few minutes to survive before hypothermia set in and you sank
like Leo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic. Not so. While survival times differ depending on your level of fat content and
your individual will to survive, you can actually last much longer…sometimes over an hour or more, even in very cold
water. I found this fascinating. An article here on
hypothermia confirms Tsung’s comments. The site also gives numerous useful tips on how to better your chances for
survival, including how to huddle with others to conserve bodily warmth and how to administer first aid to someone who
is hyperthermic. Worth checking out as we enter the cold water paddling season.