I attended Bear Paulsen's Sunday talk on solo tripping at Canoecopia. Bear has a pretty stripped-down approach to wilderness travel, but one necessity for him is something good to read while he's out there.

During the Q&A at the end, someone asked him what is favorite books/authors are, and Walden was at the top of his list. I'd read this book years ago, and thought it'd be worth re-visiting.

I fired up my new Kindle and looked first for free titles by Thoreau, and found "Canoeing in the Wilderness", an account of a canoe trip in Northern Maine in 1857. It's a short read and I'm pretty sure everyone on this forum can relate...it's amazing not only how much has changed in the past 170 years, but also how much wilderness canoe tripping is still the same. Instead of a Yakima rack on a car, they tied their birchbark canoe on top of a stagecoach.

The gear has certainly improved since then, but the experience is still pretty much the same.

"Canoeing in the Wilderness" is the latter half of "The Maine Woods", gonna need to read the whole thing. And I'm definitely bringing my Kindle along on my upcoming May solo trip, I gotta read me some Sigurd.

Canoeing in the Wilderness

I've been reading Sig a bit lately. Just reread (a few times) his "Why Wilderness" essay. That last paragraph gets me a little misty almost every time:

"Why wilderness?
Ask the men who have known it and who have made it part
of their lives. They might not be able to explain, but your very
question will kindle a light in eyes that have reflected the
campfires of a continent, eyes that have known the glory of dawns
and sunsets and nights under the stars. Wilderness to them is real,
and this they do know: When the pressure becomes more than
they can stand, somewhere back of beyond, where roads and steel
and towns are still forgotten, they will find release. " - Sig Olson,

The Maine Woods is a great read, as is anything by Sig.

Got a copy of The Maine Woods and made my first read of it while on my first visit to Maine, last August. We put into paddle part of Moosehead Lake, carried over to the West Penobscot and paddled down that a ways, then portaged to Allagash Lake and down the Allagash to near the St John. Thoreau had been on some of the same waters and routes about 175 years before, and it was real interesting to read his perceptions and observations along the way. At the time he went, there was only one town on Moosehead, down on the south end, and they went up the lake on a steamboat... Lumbering for white pine was already well underway... He itemized what it cost at the time, including renting the services of an indigenous guide; and he was amazed at the skill of that guide in poling upstream in rapids... we did not pole, and it was a slog going upstream.

rtallent: "Got a copy of The Maine Woods and made my first read of it while on my first visit to Maine, last August. We put into paddle part of Moosehead Lake, carried over to the West Penobscot and paddled down that a ways, then portaged to Allagash Lake and down the Allagash to near the St John. Thoreau had been on some of the same waters and routes about 175 years before, and it was real interesting to read his perceptions and observations along the way. At the time he went, there was only one town on Moosehead, down on the south end, and they went up the lake on a steamboat... Lumbering for white pine was already well underway... He itemized what it cost at the time, including renting the services of an indigenous guide; and he was amazed at the skill of that guide in poling upstream in rapids... we did not pole, and it was a slog going upstream."

that’s so cool.

I could be wrong, but I think the only two books published when Henry Thoreau was alive were Walden and Cape Cod. I think his sister (?) helped put together Maine Woods from his journals after he passed. He was a prodigious journal writer and some other great stuff came from his journals; his friend and supporter, the more famous (at the time) Emerson, may have felt that he had not focused on the mark/ perhaps not risen to his abilities. History suggests different.

rtallent: "I could be wrong, but I think the only two books published when Henry Thoreau was alive were Walden and Cape Cod. I think his sister (?) helped put together Maine Woods from his journals after he passed. He was a prodigious journal writer and some other great stuff came from his journals; his friend and supporter, the more famous (at the time) Emerson, may have felt that he had not focused on the mark/ perhaps not risen to his abilities. History suggests different."

The journals are being used by researchers to identify environmental changes from climate change. I saw an exhibition in Concord highlighting this work several years ago when we lived in NH. It is now available online:


Early Spring: Henry Thoreau and Climate Change

Yep, I think his times were earlier at Concord, then, at least for some plants (fancy term for timing, now, is phenology). He also recorded plants and flowering in the Maine woods; he was a good botanist. One thing he also observed in The Maine Woods was how many of the uplands (including a large island in Moosehead Lake) had gentle slopes on the northwest and shear slopes on the southeast. This is now attributed to direction, there, of continental glaciation, which Agassiz was just beginning to theorize in the 1840's. Not sure Thoreau had heard of that, yet, but he sure did observe stuff.