Book Review: One Incredible Journey
by Brand Frentz

Kruger, Verlen and Klein, Clayton. One Incredible Journey, Wilderness House Books (out of print), Fowlerville, Michigan, 1985, 445 pages.

Longer and more difficult canoe trips than the 1971 Cross Continent Canoe Safari have been made, including by Verlen Kruger himself in later years. But this is the best book about a tough trip that I have read. Not a polished, literary work, it is the kind of writing some of the early explorers did. Kruger has a sharp eye and the careful habits of a good reporter. He tells in plain language about the hard, concrete, and fabulous things that a canoeist sees and experiences every day on a good trip. And he doesn’t miss much. It is the kind of book that would be very useful to others traveling these waters, just as Kruger used earlier reports on his trip.

The simple story is this. On April 17, 1971, 48-year-old Verlen Kruger of DeWitt, Michigan and 36-year-old Clint Waddell of St. Paul, Minnesota left Montreal, Canada in a 21-foot fiberglass canoe built by Kruger. Following the historic route of the voyageurs up the Ottawa River and through Lake Superior they crossed the Height of Land from North to South lakes and entered the Hudson Bay basin on May 30, crossed 13-mile Methy Portage into the Arctic Ocean basin on July 27-28, crossed McDougall Pass to enter the Yukon River basin on September 9, and reached the Bering Sea at the river’s mouth in Alaska on October 10. They paddled nearly 7,000 miles in 176 days, made 133 portages totaling 153 miles, and lined their boat 54 miles.

The book is methodical. It begins with some 25 pages of introduction, and then goes through "Day 1," "Day 2," and so on to the end, "Day 176." This is followed by a one-page epilogue, plus an interesting bibliography and a useful index. Kruger tells you what time they got up, what they ate, the weather, the water conditions, the scenery, some historical background, and a little bit of emotion (mainly his own unquenchable optimism). The book has eight maps that show the entire route clearly. For most whitewater (going upstream as well as down) Kruger tells what line they took to get through. In other words, the book gives you a mass of factual information in straightforward, understandable language.

And the facts of this trip are impressive. Pre-trip study told them that they would need every possible day of ice-free travel, so they planned to leave Montreal on April 10. But 1971 saw a very late break-up on the Ottawa River. On April 17 it was still frozen. What did they do? They started portaging! Kruger carried the 110-pound canoe and a 60-pound pack; Waddell took two packs totaling 170 pounds. And they walked along the river, through town and country (a photo is captioned "Portaging along Lakeshore Drive"), for 44 miles, into Day 4. Then finally they could put their boat in water and start paddling. Kruger had a boot problem and wore off six of his ten toenails during this mammoth portage. But he paid no attention—they were underway!

The paddling got tougher. Lake Superior was a major challenge. On their fourth day on the big lake the wind was so strong that the two experienced canoe racers paddling full strength into the wind suddenly realized they were going backwards. They slipped into a protected bay. Later they were driven off the water by a major two-day storm with four inches of cold rain and howling, 50-mph winds. One early morning the bay they were in froze and they spent an hour paddling through ice. The weather was so bad that they decided to paddle any time conditions permitted. When the opportunity came they paddled 38 hours straight without camping, and covered 115 miles. The Superior crossing took 13 days, 4 1/2 spent wind-bound.

When they reached the Mackenzie River delta in what was then Northwest Territories, with difficulty and some luck they found the Rat River channel coming in. This was the beginning of 54 miles of lining the canoe up this mountain stream to the pass over the Richardson Mountains into the Yukon basin. Because the Rat was running high and has steep banks they spent most of this brutal nine-day haul knee-deep in icy water (air temperatures were in the 20s and 30s, with almost constant freezing rain). They stopped every half hour or so to drain the water out of their boots and rub their feet back to life. Finally they reached McDougall Pass, and it was all downstream to the ocean.

These are just examples of the hardships that Kruger and Waddell faced and overcame. In those conditions it was not always easy to get along. Kruger touches lightly on a few conflicts and sharp words, but his absolute confidence and his religious faith — the book reports — kept them going. Waddell’s main quality appears to have been the physical and mental strength to push on no matter how bleak things got. The dimensions of the trip — 7,000 miles, most of them hard — show how rugged these men were. In these days of overblown language where hamburgers, basketball shots, and high school girls’ hairdos are called "incredible," it is good to see the word applied this way — describing a canoe trip that is in fact hard to believe, an impressive achievement by two very tough men.