9000km solo cross Canada by Kayak

[shirk]

www.kayak99.com

Ilya Klvana crossed Canada from west to east by kayak back in 99. He has finally got his book published about the adventure.

It's the first time anyone has kayaked across Canada solo in one shipping season. He left Price Rupert BC in May and finished in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland in November, 9000km of kayaking and portaging.

He followed original fur trapping routes used by the Coureur des Bois in a cedar strip kayak he built himself. He didn't do it to raise money for some cause or any lofty goal, he simply did it for the adventure. Seems to often all we hear about is trips that are done for media attention.

The book is in french, so if you happen to read french I suggest grabbing a copy.

[HingeFootCutFace]

nice! I wonder how many beavers he saw along the way?

[Hugh Conway]

Cool trip

[iscariot]

Nice.

I new a guy in undergrad who paddled a canoe solo from Rocky Mountain House to the Atlantic over a summer.

He let a few of us read his journal/memoirs from the trip. Really amazing stuff. Mental and physical exhaustion, elation,...the peace and rage of nature.

He also did a trip from Edmonton to Tuktoyaktuk in a 9 person canoe (with some friends) that looked like a cross between a Dragonboat and something the Vikings paddled (look like that to a boat jong anyway).

[Professor Chaos]

On a related top, check out Borealis and Mammalian by Frank Wolf.
Local dude I used to work with. Really good filmaker/storyteller.

Borealis is a cross-Canada canoe trip(with another friend-Taku Hokoyama) and Mammalian is similar however it is across the Northwest Territories.
Both are really well done and have an ecological/biome perspective to them, so not just a "this is an epic quest" type thing.

http://www.frank-wolf.net/

[Sam Walker]

Cool. It would have been getting pretty cold in November where he finished off.

[geekthegreek]

Nice. One of my favorite 'adventure/Canadian natural history' books is Magnetic North, the tale about a 22 year-old American kid (David Halsey) who decided to hike, canoe, and dogsled across Canada, from Vancouver to Tadoussac, Quebec, in the late 1970s. It was the first modern-day self-propelled trip across the country, and quite a tale of hardship and heartbreak. It has a very poignant feel to it, as Halsey couldn't quite transition back to suburban US life after the voyage, and tragically ended up dying of an overdose of antidepressants (book was completed from his journal by a co-author).
Anyway, congrats to Ilya for his (?) accomplishment.

[Alaskan Rover]

Sounds like Ilya must be one hell of a hard-core dude...most Russians are. I know some parts of that route...at least the part through northern Saskatchewan. Been up there in that area...LOTS and LOTS of brush, nettles and timber. Plus a hell of a lot of portaging needed through that section of Saskatchewan. My dad did a three-week canoeing trip in that part of Sask when he was a young man and said he can still feel the mosquitos biting. Carhartts come in handy in those sections of Canada...that and ballistic nylon.

[Van_skier]

Sounds like Ilya must be one hell of a hard-core dude...most Russians are.

Yes, he's definitely hardcore.... Not Russian though: his heritage is Czech with some French mixed in for good measure.

I know some parts of that route...at least the part through northern Saskatchewan. Been up there in that area...LOTS and LOTS of brush, nettles and timber. Plus a hell of a lot of portaging needed through that section of Saskatchewan. My dad did a three-week canoeing trip in that part of Sask when he was a young man and said he can still feel the mosquitos biting. Carhartts come in handy in those sections of Canada...that and ballistic nylon.

Mosquitoes were definitely challenging in that part of the country. I seem to recall him mentioning eating chili con mosquitoes many nights in a row...

Lots of portaging indeed:


La Loche river in SK: