An Iowa native is touring the state to promote his new book about his long canoe trip across Canada more than 30 years ago with three other “greenhorns” from the Iowa cornfields.
Dennis Weidemann penned “This Water Goes North” about his unusual experiences on the 14-hundred mile, three-month journey. They started in northern Minnesota, paddling for three weeks along the Red River into Canada.
The four eventually reached the 300-mile long “tempermental beast” of Lake Winnipeg, which is pretty much the end of civilization, he says. The tale, Weidemann says, is one of near-disasters, spendid sunsets and the indomitable spirit of youth.
After getting across Lake Winnipeg, he says the real adventure into desolation began. From there, it was 400 more miles of pure wilderness before reaching an old fur trading post on Hudson Bay, where they met bootleggers, Mounties and even polar bears.
Weideman, who now lives in Wisconsin, says he likely wouldn’t try to take another canoe trip of this sort, not because he’s “old and brittle” now, but because you just can’t attempt to repeat an experience like this. Still, he says Iowans who wanted to take their own adventure across Canada could pull it off.
“You could still do the trip and come away with a lot of the same experiences,” Weideman says, though a few fly-in fishing lodges are along the way now, but northern Manitoba is still very much an unspoiled region of the world, mostly unchanged since he was there in the summer of 1979.
For more information, visit: www.thiswatergoesnorth.com
Thanks to Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City