Customer Reviews

Canoeing The Driftless: A Paddlers Guide for Southeastern Minnesota

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Canoeing the Driftless? Not so much....

I bought this book expecting to find a useful guide to paddling some rivers that, while quite close to my home in Northern Iowa, were unknown to me and poorly-referenced on the Web.

What I found instead was an outdated beginners' guide to (apparently) talking about the streams rather than about paddling them.

Examples:

1) Poorly-done maps. With maps like these, the paddler will have to search a long time to find the referenced access points.

2) Over-estimated trip times. I really cannot imagine paddlers (as opposed to floaters) actually averaging 2 miles per hour: yet that seems to be the norm for this text.

3) Questionable stream difficulty ratings. We tried several of the "moderate difficulty" streams and found them to be discouragingly over-rated.

4) Outdated references. Several locations in the book are described with reference to commercial establishments that no longer exist. I realize that the book is over 6 years old at this point, but references to such "short life time" places might well have been replaced by geographic or map features instead.

5) Water levels not mentioned. Since the USGS has river gages on many of these streams, it would make some sense to refer to those gages rather than to leave the readers guessing as to appropriate stream flow.

The author has a good idea in putting up a website to support the book [...], but the website is incomplete and a bit useless, so the idea fails in this instance.

I'd suggest leaving this book on the shelf.

Al Donaldson

I have used this book and discovered spectacular paddling rivers for both canoeing and kayaking that I never knew existed in Minnesota. A great alternative to the Boundary Waters!