Tanks for the Memories: Readers Sound Off About Aluminum Canoes

Tanks for the Memories

Readers Sound Off About Aluminum Canoes

If form indeed follows function, then there’s beauty in some of the industrial age’s most improbable offspring. Like the Grumman aluminum canoe and all the other “tin tanks” that followed in its wake, for instance. Tamia wrote about these venerable (and venerated) craft earlier in the year, and the mail she got around the column was so interesting she figured the tin tank deserved a curtain call.
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by Tamia Nelson | June 23, 2015

A Tamia Nelson Article on Backinthesameboat.com

Plastic is forever, at least when measured against the scale of human life. Scraps of lawn chairs, shreds of shopping bags, and fragments of soft drink bottles will be circulating around the world’s seas — and poisoning marine life — long after our cities go the way of the fabled Ozymandias’ “sneer of cold command.” But while plastic itself is almost eternal, the things that we make from it — including lawn chairs, shopping bags, and soft drink bottles — have a much shorter life expectancy. They are, in fact, almost ephemeral. This is true of plastic canoes, as well. Farwell’s and my veteran Old Town Tripper is a case in point. It grew progressively more brittle as the decades passed, succumbing at last to the combined … Read more »

Keeping Your Food to Yourself in the Backcountry Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are

Keeping Your Food to Yourself in the Backcountry

It’s summertime, and the wilderness is calling. Soon campsites in popular parks will be filled to overflowing, as paddlers and hikers make themselves at home where the wild things are. And with the crowds comes conflict. We want to keep our food to ourselves. But our involuntary hosts have other ideas, and the resulting differences of opinion can get messy. Is there an alternative? There is.
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by Tamia Nelson | June 6, 2015

Backcountry wanderers and campers walk a thin line in our dealings with the furred and feathered natives on whose doorsteps we camp. We want to be accepted by them, but we also want them to know their place and keep their distance. This is pretty presumptuous of us, really. Since when do house guests get to lay down rules for their hosts? Be that as it may, however, it’s much harder to strike the right balance than it used to be. Truly wild things treat infrequent blow-ins with appropriate caution and circumspection. But tens of millions of us now invade the natives’ wilderness homes, and such familiarity inevitably breeds contempt. The natives have learned … Read more »

The Man Who Wasn’t There… Keeping Wild Things Wild is Up to Us

The Man Who Wasn’t There…

Keeping Wild Things Wild is Up to Us

Backcountry wanderers and campers walk a thin line in our dealings with the furred and feathered natives on whose doorsteps we camp. We want to be accepted by them, but we also want them to know their place and keep their distance, and it’s much harder to strike the right balance than it used to be. But it’s up to us to help the wild creatures stay wild.
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by Tamia Nelson | June 1, 2015

A Tamia Nelson Article on Backinthesameboat.com

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
—Hughs Mearns, Antigonish

Ah, wilderness! The annual flight from the cities and suburbs is about to get under way in earnest. Soon many popular waterways will boast their own traffic jams, as canoes and kayaks jostle tentatively with darting jet-skis and lumbering party barges. Lighting out for the territory just ain’t what it was in Huck Finn’s day. But some things don’t change. Beyond the boundaries of the tent-cities now springing up in established campsites—the line of demarcation is easily identified by the sudden and unexpected appearance of lower … Read more »

Fighting the Cold War: Readers Wade In

Dressing for Success

Fighting the Cold War: Readers Wade In

Are drysuits worth what they cost? And which is better — to be a comfort-loving Amphibian or a safety-at-any-price Frogman? Those were the questions Tamia posed in a couple of recent articles. She outlined her answers to both questions, of course, but paddlers have minds of their own, and they weren’t shy about letting her know what they thought.
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by Tamia Nelson | May 5, 2015

A Tamia Nelson Article on Backinthesameboat.com

Last month I penned (keyboarded?) a couple of columns on a vital subject: dressing for cold-season paddling. The first of these asked if drysuits were worth the cost. (My answer: Yes, but not every paddler needs one, and some of us who need one can’t afford it.) The second outlined the less restrictive alternatives available to the experienced paddler who prefers to “dress like a sensibly turned-out hill walker” rather than an “out-of-work frogman” — a comparison borrowed from sea kayaker and British Canoe Union senior coach Derek Hutchinson.

As luck would have it, the two articles attracted a fair amount of mail. Any notion I’d had that they (along with my earlier columns on cold-season paddling and hypothermia) would exhaust the subject were soon proved wrong. … Read more »