Between Winter and Spring … Symposium Season
29 Jan
In the interstitial time between hardest winter and full-on spring is … Symposium Season. For northern wilderness paddlers, that is.
In Toronto, St. Paul, and Farilee, Vermont paddlers with their eyes on the wild rivers of Canada and their hearts in the far north will gather to share slides and stories about the trips they’ve done and the canoe country they love.
The season dawns on February 8-9, fittingly, with Toronto’s Ur-gathering, the Wilderness Canoe Symposium sponsored by Canada’s Wilderness Canoe Association and long organized by George Luste. Speakers there will include Black Spruce Journals author Stewart Coffin, In the North of Our Lives author and biologist Christopher Norment, and paddler/geologist Andrew Breckenridge.
(Scheduled to coincide with the symposium is the Reel Paddling Film Festival showing in Toronto. Details can be found HERE for the February 7 event.)
The Vermont Wilderness Paddlers Gathering follows on March 7-9 with speakers that include Coffin, photographer Rolf Kraiker, and trans-Canada paddler Jay Morrison.
The Minnesota Canoe Association’s Far North Symposium, which flirts with actual spring-time with its March 29 date, will feature descriptions of the Coppermine and Seal Rivers, offer a high-tech gear presentation by long-time tundra paddler Bob O’Hara, and provide an answer — thanks to speaker Judith Niemi — to the apparently puzzling question of what really happens on women-only canoe trips.
Until it’s time to paddle in the North … let’s symposium!
