It all started about 35 years go, I was in grade 7 and I had my first canoe trip. It was a day trip that my uncle and his family were taking on the Bow River, from the Ghost Lake Dam down to the Cochrane bridge.
From that point forward, I thought about having my own canoes. As a boy in a small town in Western Canada, the one place I could go to, to dream of canoes, was the red and green Coleman canoes that were in the Canadian Tire catalogue. I would look through it and scheme of which canoe, paddles and life jackets I would get and how much they would cost and then what I would need to do, to make the money that would be needed to make those canoes mine.
Fast forward a few decades, and I have 3 canoes. The first one is my Mad River, a river canoe that I bought once out of college after realizing that the Coleman canoe was not exactly a boat designed for tripping on rivers and lakes. The other two are 60-70 year old cedar & canvas canoes that I bought the summer before we moved to Texas. I had grand plans to refinish them both, but with moving across the continent and a rigorous global travel schedule, that plan has fallen by the wayside, until NOW.
Nessmuk
“To have commanded the paddle, tasted the wind and challenged the river-one would have believed that the splendor of God’s Wilderness is reserved for the canoeist.”
The Road Less Paddled 