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OTTAWA XL—Throwing Screws
The first annual Ottawa XL concluded last weekend, bringing the sickest freestyle tricks to an epic whitewater year for the Ottawa river. Overall winners from the inaugural event qualified for the 2014 Whitewater Grand Prix.
All Features
Buffalo River, AR
04.13.2004
Although I’m usually garrulous among my paddling friends, my first view of Arkansas’ Buffalo River left me speechless. At sunrise, we topped the final bluff and peered into the valley far below. There, snaking through a solid stand of hardwoods and scattered conifers, was a silver strand of moving water. This was the Buffalo, a [...]
Green River, NC
04.13.2004
In the summer of ’82, before the roads were paved or the parking lots cut, western North Carolina’s Class I-II Lower Green River was one of the wildest places I had ever been. I was sure I had cheated death when I survived wrapping a canoe in the largest rapid, Big Corky. More than two [...]
Okefenokee, GA
04.13.2004
My daughter Courtney (nine years old) and I (ancient) had been planning a trip to the Okefenokee for about a year. We had held out little hope that it would happen because it can be difficult to get a backcountry permit in the swamp. There are only seven available campsites, and demand peaks during the [...]
Outer Banks, NC
04.13.2004
Many great ideas run aground on the shoals of reality, but you always figure that’s not going to happen to you. Especially on your paddling vacation, double especially after two days of driving and eager anticipation. Yet there I was on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, incredulously stuck in the unwelcome reality of being grounded on [...]
Upper Iowa River, IA
04.12.2004
In the Midwest, where a 200-foot-tall bump is considered a mountain, you get used to pancake-flat land and sluggish prairie streams. Yet tucked away in an isolated corner of northeast Iowa is a cliff-lined gorge that the glaciers forgot to flatten: the Upper Iowa River valley. Winding through one of the wildest and most unspoiled [...]
St. Francis River, MO
04.12.2004
It’s mid-March, and some friends and I make a 280-mile drive from central Illinois to the Saint Francis River. We pull into the Silver Mines Recreation Area late on a Friday night and find a pleasant wooded campsite. Saturday dawns crisp and clear. Excitement is in the air as we say hello to boaters from [...]
Boundary Waters, MN
04.12.2004
After a long day of paddling, I usually sleep like the dead, but something woke me with a start. Listening, all I heard was blood roaring through my head and a scraping on the tent wall as dried leaves skidded down its side. Finally, the sound came again. From across the water emanated a mournful [...]
Isle Royale, MI
04.12.2004
Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” played in my head as I bobbed up and down in large cresting waves: The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead When the skies of November [...]
Reno Celebrates Whitewater
04.07.2004
Reno knows how to throw a party, and this one is for kayakers and those who like to watch them! The city stages the grand opening of its new $1.5 million whitewater kayak park with the inaugural Reno River Festival, May 14-16 Events include an invitational pro-kayaker rodeo, a wild boater-cross race open to all, [...]
Pine Barrens, NJ
04.06.2004
If I hadn’t already known that the run would be passable for the entirety of my 10.5-mile trip, I probably would have left my canoe on the car and driven home. At the put-in near the Atsion Ranger Station, the Mullica River looks more like a glorified drainage ditch than a free-flowing stream. But this [...]
Acadia National Park, ME
04.06.2004
The roads are uncharacteristically quiet on the way past Pretty Marsh and on down to Bartlett’s Landing. We’re on the western edge of Mount Desert Island, what locals call “the quiet side.” Just days before the July 4th weekend, the area around Acadia National Park has the feel of the eye of a hurricane, a [...]
Hudson River, NY
04.06.2004
When it comes to planning a paddling destination, it’s easy to overlook the Hudson River. Its waters flow by cities and towns with some 11 million people, hardly the stuff of adventure and getting away from it all. But the Hudson is more than metropolitan. Along this river can be found 100-foot-high waterfalls, hills rising [...]
Allagash Wilderness Waterway, ME
04.05.2004
It is early October in New England and the maples are riotous with color. To our south looms grand, solitary Mount Katahdin, at 5,267 feet the highest mountain in Maine. To our north stretches a 10-million-acre emerald-green forest all the way to Quebec. This immense piece of real estate, owned largely by timber companies and [...]
Paddling in Fiji
03.25.2004
Rule No. 1 in the quest for happiness could be: Make the Best Use of Your Vacation Time. Canoe & Kayak Managing Editor Robin Stanton did just that last fall, when she and her husband, Douglas King, took the 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to Fiji. Once there, they paddled, snorkled, and hiked the paths [...]
WW Paddle Review
03.17.2004
For years, whitewater kayaks have been getting shorter and stranger. Now, some of that same innovation is popping up in the paddles that power the playboats. This year’s crop of new paddles shows that manufacturers are branching out as they try to create the perfect stick. The difference in the blades alone is impressive. Who [...]
Buyer's Guide
