In the Wake: An 80 Day Canoe Odyssey Into Canada's Northern Wilderness
A brand new 368 page canoeing book just came out this month… In the Wake: An 80 Day Canoe Odyssey into Canada's Northern Wilderness by author James McNamara.
Disillusioned with the boundaries of wilderness parks, two paddlers in one canoe sought wilderness that was wild by nature, not by law. In 1991, they loaded a canoe with food for three months and paddled away from the end of the road toward the most remote spot on the continent. After 80 grueling days, they returned, having found their deep wilderness and seen the imprints of past cultures who once called the Canadian north home. Nostalgic about times past, they could not know that they, too, witnessed the end of an era before the information revolution took hold. In the Wake is their story about deep wilderness in those end times.
“In the Wake carries the reader deep into the canoe county of northern Canada, from the boreal forest to the Barren Lands and back again. A pencil line tracing the route used by Jim and Laurie McNamara in 1991 wouldn’t do their trip justice. Neither would straightforward numbers: two people, one seventeen-foot-long canoe, eighty days of travel, 850 pounds of food and equipment, and one thousand miles of portaging and paddling. Instead, you must read the book—and in doing so, grab a taste of their adventure, experience the numbing weariness of hauling a 100-pound pack across a trailless portage, feel the ecstasy of sinking deeply into wilderness, and understand the uncertainty of not knowing where your route might take you, in the era before GPS devices and satellite phones made wilderness travel a less challenging undertaking than it is today.”
Order a copy today from your local bookseller, or at Amazon.ca. You can also read it digitally on the Kindle Bookstore or Kobo bookstore.
