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So the lost and found trip of Grand Canyon from January keeps on unfolding. I got an email from a kind-hearted soul living out in Meadview who came across a red helmet with a camera attached amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Lake Mead. No name inside (you'd think I'd have learned my lesson by...

There was some question a few months ago about the history of canoes in Grand Canyon. Well, for those curious, Tom Martin, the unofficial (and oft times official) historian of GC, has done a little digging for the record. Here is what he has found: 1900 - Ten foot long stick/ canvas canoe used...

This will probably feel like a primary school question to most of you, and I suspect you'll laugh at me, but I have never owned a canoe with wood gunnels before. I've had only vinyl. I've replaced some gunnels, but I replaced them with the vinyl strips. And then, upon returning home yesterday...

So I'm working on scribbling down a bunch of stuff and pulling together this and that and, while I don't want to bore people with long-winded ramblings that probably mean very little to anyone but myself, I'll start putting some of my rougher, unconnected sentences up here. I'm also trying to...

Quite a few people on this site, myself among them, spend a good deal of time paddling solo. Some of us paddle alone for weeks at a time, alone in the dark wilds, alone in the wide open, alone in the cold. Some of us--though of course no one on this particular site--go a little loopy. (Chris...

I've never been much of a tarp guy. Not for a primary sleeping shelter, anyway. I mean, sure, string one up to sit under, play banjo under, eat supper under, but when the snow falls and the temperature drops or the creatures slither up from the soil or the skies open up I like the security of a...

My house was built a number of years ago, like 152 years ago, and sometimes it feels like it’s falling down around me, like it’s finally moved somehow into the autumn of its existence. I’ve got two hundred projects I’m not doing, and I’m really not one for yard work or gutter maintenance, which...

So the air stays pretty wet here in the Virginias and my sleeping bags of choice are typically synthetic. I love the weight and compactability of down, but I often wake up in the deciduous rain forests of West Virginia soaked, and down loses most of its appeal when soaked. But so I've needed a...

Canoo Peeple: My Esquif Vertige X was stolen from Lynchburg, VA last week. It's a blue boat with all stickers removed. (No esquif logo or factory pinstriping remains. It's all scraped clean.) It's a blue boat with about 900 gentleel-ish miles on it. I mean, it ain't beat to heck but it's...

So on a slight impulse I picked up this Yeti soft shelled cooler last year, like last May, the HOPPER, they call it, the HOPPER 20 or some such verbish-sounding noun (sense), 20 meaning the small one, or, like, the REAL small one now, or 20 meaning that it can apparently hold 20 pounds of ice...

If you happen upon southeastern West Virginia and there happens to be water in the Greenbrier River and you happen to be toting your canoe and you’ve got a few days to check out some West Virginia history and paddle through some long green sycamore and river birch tunnels on some delightfully...

So me and Mr. Mechanically Inclined Boatman A.F. took off west on I-64 out of central VA and rolled out through the hills under a piece of sunshine making the year’s first warm weather pilgrimage to the New River Gorge in West Virginia. We wore mostly dry suits for the chilly water but the days...

So I borrowed a few GoPros yesterday and attempted a short video. Har har har. My first. All-in-a-day backyard canoe outing. Amateurish and unschooled, definitely. Some dead batteries. Millions of miles of useless tape. My story lines tend to be informed from an English Major's literary...

So the old man and I finally took a long awaited springtime trip down to North Tennessee to run the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. It was a new river for both of us, though I think he may have run the "upper" gorge some twenty-five or thirty years ago. He couldn't quite remember and...

The last few weeks have been wet here in central Virginia. Several days of rain in our already saturated Blue Ridge have given the creeks and rivers a nice stable base layer allowing them to maintain boatable water flows for days on end. Even higher up on the mountains. Daytime temperatures this...

Canooing Peeple: Well, I failed on my lotteries for the Selway, Middle Fork, Rogue and Salt, but today I won a GC launch date for Monday, January 2, 2017. A self-supported canoe trip down the Grand. And thus the countdown begins. Pretty stoked.

One of the singular pleasures of paddling in an old mountain range, say, the Appalachian Mountains of ‘Merica’s east coast, comes in the form of small mountain streams that come tumbling out of the hollows and down between the hills before emptying out onto the Piedmont and meandering their way...

Virginia Solo Life: An Apology All, Greetings from Central Virginia's Piedmont. Trust I won’t wear out my welcome with more information than you ever wanted to know about me (and then some), but then... I hail from a small city just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains established along the James...