My first strong memory of a canoe was paddling a beat-up, old, fiberglass canoe on the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Many adventures ensued. Kirk Wipper, the founder of the Canadian Canoe Museum, captured what a canoe means to me when he said, “You have to do what you can, do your best with what you are. And you have to believe in wilderness. If you do that you can’t go wrong.”

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

-Aldo Leopold

Download the tear sheet: The Canoe