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Cliff Jacobson

Joined
Sep 25, 2022
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Location
S. Central Alaska
Not being as studious or well versed in all things canoe as most of you; i’ve been reading quite a bit lately, more for entertainment sake. I enjoy most of what i read on here and other places as well and recently discovered this fellow; Cliff Jacobson.
i plugged him into our search and found 4 pages of discussion that has taken place over time! His site is a wealth of information and i’ve enjoyed several of his articles.

As with most things, he seems to have both strong supporters and plenty of detractors. At an Olympic event years ago, Shawn White told the interviewer “you guys just need to live better stories”. As someone who's lived at least my share of “better stories” i certainly appreciate someone like this.

Heck, i bet some of you know the guy? In any case i always appreciate anyone who’s got real world experience and the ability to pass it along.
 
At Canoecopia, I think the only thing better than seeing Cliff present is Kevin Callen imitating Cliff. With respect, I'm pretty sure Cliff has forgotten more about camping and canoeing in the last year than I've learned in 71 years.
 
I always found his books and articles very informative, He was a big help when I first started canoe tripping and I really can’t think of anything he ever said that I disagreed with.
Some of his endorsements had me thinking twice, but I don’t remember much about that anymore, I just remember he helped me a lot.
 
Met him a number of times at Canoecopia over the past 40 years and at Midwest Mountaineering Expos (MN) over the past 8-10 years and he is very approachable and easy/fun to talk to. Although he has some strong opinions he is accepting of differing opinions.

And he is fun to party with. He has joined the Wabakimi Project Saturday night socials at the shows a few times.
 
Always made it a point to see one Cliff's talks at MidWest Mountaineering's Spring events.
Enjoyed them, and subscribe to several of his teachings !

The one story I often revive, is how he took a bunch of 8th graders to the BWCA.
He said they were the slowest group to get up and get going !
One thing he required the group to do, was to keep a Journal, that would be turned in at the end.
Cliff stated they were the best Journals he had read !
A good thought !
 
I too have several of his books. Removing the buttons from your cuffs and replacing them with Velcro to thwart pesky black flies was a stoke of genius!

Barry
 
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Cliff's "Expedition Canoeing" was a major resource for my learning the sport of canoe tripping in the late eighties. My other resource was Bill Mason's "Path of the Paddle" and to a lesser extent "Song of the Paddle."
Yes. Those books gave me the confidence to lead some more ambitious canoe trips.
 
I have every one of his books and have read them all more than once. I also just pick them up once in awhile just to read parts of them or pick up a tip or two for an upcoming trip. I also enjoy the stories on his blog. Like others have said, he was a great resource when I started canoe camping many years ago.
 
I have quite a few of his books as well......He is definitely one of my "canoe tripping Idols". He is in his early to mid 80's now and still taking month long trips every Summer. Primarily river trips in Northern Canada. Kind of a funny story, about 10 or so years ago I was in the boundary waters, about 4 or 5 portages from my planned exit point and I encountered a group of 4 older(than me) gentlemen all portaging older solo canoes on their way down to the Frost River. I stopped and chatted with one of the guys and he asked me a lot of questions about water levels and such as I had just come from the area he was headed to. I had this funny feeling that I knew this guy from somewhere, but for the life of me couldn't figure out from where.....A couple of weeks later, I was on the Piragis website and saw there was a new blog post and clicked on it and it was a story about Cliff having just paddled the Frost River! in the photo of him, he was wearing the same clothes that I had encountered him in. I have since seen him a couple of times at Canoecopia. His presentations are standing room only and not only is he very informative, but also quite entertaining. I found him to be quite approachable. About 5 or 6 years ago, I was looking into the new (then) Northstar Phoenix. Cliff had just traded in his Bell Yellowstone for a new Phoenix and had written a nice review of it. I e-mailed him thru his website asking a few questions about the canoe, explaining that I was thinking of buying one. We e-mailed back and forth a few times about it. A few months later, I had an opportunity to test paddle one......

Mike
 
CJ was one of the first authors I bought when I got serious about canoeing around 1980. He's possibly best known for his strong opinions on two camping controversies: He argues that hanging food packs is usually an unnecessary waste of time and effort, and that ground cloths should be put inside tents instead of underneath them.

Cliff is also in the line of well-known canoe authors/teachers of short stature, along with George Washington Sears ("Nessmuk"), Bill Mason and Marc Ornstein.
 
CJ was one of the first authors I bought when I got serious about canoeing around 1980. He's possibly best known for his strong opinions on two camping controversies: He argues that hanging food packs is usually an unnecessary waste of time and effort, and that ground cloths should be put inside tents instead of underneath them.

Cliff is also in the line of well-known canoe authors/teachers of short stature, along with George Washington Sears ("Nessmuk"), Bill Mason and Marc Ornstein.
I have not read any of Cliff Jacobsen. Began by reading Bill Mason. Kathleen and I developed our skills by paddling and doing. We have never hung food on our wilderness canoeing trips. Primarily, because where we paddle in the far north, such hanging possibilities do not exist. We store our food packs under the canoe, far enough away from our tent where we would not be confused with the food. But close enough where we would hear marauding bears, and could do something about it. No one told us this. It just seemed obvious and logical. We have never had a problem in over 30 years of wilderness tripping, where black bears, grizzlies and polar bears are very prevalent. Does this mean Cliff Jacobsen is right? Who the heck cares? I don’t. Or, in the words of Bob Dylan, in Subterranean Homesick Blues, “Don’t follow leaders. Watch for parkin’ meters.”

i was completely unaware of the ground cloth debate. Kathleen and I place a ground cloth both beneath and inside the tent. Does this make our approach right? Absolutely!

By the way, Kathleen and I are both short in stature, but tall in experience and wilderness canoeing success,

I would also like to say that I actually object to the term “wilderness,” which strikes me as a European explorer construct. To the native people who inhabited North America, they lived at home, not in some hypothetical wilderness.
 
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CJ was one of the first authors I bought when I got serious about canoeing around 1980. He's possibly best known for his strong opinions on two camping controversies: He argues that hanging food packs is usually an unnecessary waste of time and effort, and that ground cloths should be put inside tents instead of underneath them.

Cliff is also in the line of well-known canoe authors/teachers of short stature, along with George Washington Sears ("Nessmuk"), Bill Mason and Marc Ornstein.
lol, I very nearly cited those exact two "controversies" in my earlier reply.
 
By the way, Kathleen and I are both short in stature

Well, there you go. This correlation of short on height/long on words is surely more than coincidence.

I would also like to say that I actually object to the term “wilderness,” which strikes me as a European explorer construct.

Feisty tonight. Ah think "wilderness" is a fine word that, Vikings aside, predates by hundreds of years the arrival of Europeans in the New World (which, of course, wasn't "new" to the inhabitants, and hence is truly a European construct). It just means wild land; land that is mostly uninhabited and remains in its natural state, unfarmed and uncitified.

I object to the term "barren lands" because I have learned and seen pictures from respected biologists that those lands are actually teeming with interesting flora and fauna. If I were younger, I would go there just to spend hours pushing ants and dead spiders around with sticks, as my spouse spills leaky bannock dough on the exposed cleavage of Muslim oxen, oddly looking for the Pope in the wrong direction, as her pants fall down while trying to buy white wine at an Esso station. I may have read all that in Cliff Jacobson, but my memory is getting short.
 
I object to the term "barren lands" because I have learned and seen pictures from respected biologists that those lands are actually teeming with interesting flora and fauna. If I were younger, I would go there just to spend hours pushing ants and dead spiders around with sticks, as my spouse spills leaky bannock dough on the exposed cleavage of Muslim oxen, oddly looking for the Pope in the wrong direction, as her pants fall down while trying to buy white wine at an Esso station. I may have read all that in Cliff Jacobson, but my memory is getting short.
Very impressive, Glenn! Thanks for reading our story,!! We laughed heartily several times.
 
CJ was one of the first authors I bought when I got serious about canoeing around 1980. He's possibly best known for his strong opinions on two camping controversies: He argues that hanging food packs is usually an unnecessary waste of time and effort, and that ground cloths should be put inside tents instead of underneath them.

Cliff is also in the line of well-known canoe authors/teachers of short stature, along with George Washington Sears ("Nessmuk"), Bill Mason and Marc Ornstein.
I typically sleep in a hammock so never worried about the groundcloth in or out of the tent......with that said, I like PaddlinPitt's idea of doing both. I do like Cliff's thoughts on the "bear bag". It can be difficult finding one or two trees of sufficient height and distance apart to properly hang. A few years ago, we were passing thru Kekekebic (sp?) Lake in the BWCA. It was about lunch timed, we spotted what appeared to be an open campsite with a nice landing about a 1/4 mile away and decided it would be a good spot to stop, stretch our legs and have lunch. We got to within about 100' of the landing when we spotted a patch of black fur moving thru the underbrush heading into camp. We stopped paddling and watched as mama bear came strolling into camp followed by two cubs. She took them straight to the fire pit and began "instructing" the cubs on where to search for food....atleast that's how it looked to us. after tearing apart the fire pit in search of food, mama bear next took them to this big tree on the edge of the camp opening It had a good sized limb about 20' off the ground that would have been ideal to hang a food bag. Again, to us it looked like mama bear was showing them where to find a food pack piñata as she stood up against the tree directly under this limb and her cubs followed suit. They then walked around the camp perimeter before coming down to the landing for a drink.....We then paddled off and found another lunch stop.

Mike
 
I have several of Cliff's books and find him to be very knowledgeable about canoe tripping. I have enjoyed his books and have learned lots of things. Having said that, I find his dismissive and arrogant attitude toward methods that other people have found successful and toward equipment that is different from what he uses to be very off-putting.
 
I probably have most of his books.
I've picked up some really good tips from him.
One of the best is his advice to put the ground sheet inside the tent and not under it.
There are things I don't agree with him on, like his love of tump lines and canoe packs.
And I don't know how he fits all his camping gear in his canoe. I don't take half that much stuff and my canoe is full.
If he comes out with another book, I'll probably buy that too.
 
Regarding the inside/outside debate for ground sheets, I re-read Cliff's advice from Canoeing Wild Rivers, 30th Anniversay Edition, and I don't think Cliff is advising anyone to put the groundcloth/footprint that is typically sold by the tent manufacturer to go with a specific tent model inside the tent as opposed to under it, where it protects the floor of the tent from sharp objects.

Cliff specifically says in Canoeing Wild Rivers that what goes inside the tent should be a "plastic ground cloth ... made large enough to flow 12 inches up each side of the tent." I imagine a heavy-duty plastic painters drop cloth from the box store would be the ideal material.

The groundcloths/footprints sold by the tent manufacturers to go with specific tents generally are made of material other than plastic and wouldn't meet Cliff's specifications anyway because they are normally sized slightly smaller than the actual floor of the tent (so that rain doesn't land on the ground cloth and run between the ground clorth and the tent floor). I know some people skip buying these manufacturers' groundcloths/footprints because of the added weight/bulk of packing them. But if you have one of the manufacturers' groundcloths/footprints, put it under the tent to protect the floor of the tent, not to waterproof it. Cliff is saying to put something completely different inside the tent for waterproofing.

All of this is probably obvious to the more experienced folks here but it confused the heck out of me the first time I read it.
 
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