Survival Common Sense Blog | Emergency Preparedness
Survival Common Sense Blog | Emergency Preparedness
Good gear is an investment. I bought my 15-foot Coleman Ram-X canoe before setting out on my 1980 Source-to-Sea voyage on the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. The canoe is still being used.
read moreIt’s a wonderful quandary: Bark River UP Gunny or UP Bravo? Which one do you want to buy? The UP Bravo is the knife I would have designed for me. But the BR Gunny is one of my favorite knife series. Which one will be the best choice for you?
read moreAll cutlery aficionados have that grail knife somewhere in the back of their minds.
But this Bark River UP Bravo meets all my requirements for a hunting/bushcraft knife, and my search for the grail may be over. Maybe.
The widest spot on the Mississippi is Lake Winnibigoshish.
read moreThe Bark River Crash Ax performs way above its weight class. Here is what I found about ax’s performance on a Mississippi River canoe trip.
read moreSometimes an experience will bring up memories that have lain dormant for years. Maybe it was of something that didn’t seem particularly important at the time it was happening. Possibly the new experience is like a key word on a computer that opens up an apparently unrelated, or unsuspected file.
Or maybe that first memory wasn’t complete, without something to trigger it.
Redwing, MN has a large marina, beautifully restored old homes and a great local museum. From the marina, I wandered up to the Goodhue County Museum on the hill. In the early 1850s, settlers came to Redwing to farm in Goodhue County. Land was selling for $15 per acre, and the cash crop was wheat. A few bumper crop years…
read moreOnce you get through the lock at St.Paul, the Mississippi changes character and becomes a commercial river.
read moreFrom Cass Lake to Grand Rapids, Mike and I paddled through the land of Paul Bunyon, the legendary logger, on the river that was the highway of the Minnesota timber industry until the 1940s. The world’s largest animated man, according to theme park hype, is this display of Paul Bunyon in Brainerd. Local legends are part of the…
read moreLake Itasca to Bemidgi We started paddling the next morning from Wanagan through a canoeist’s paradise. The Upper Mississippi is a canoeist’s paradise! (traveltips.usatoday.com photo) The scenery ranged from pine forests that infused the air with a sweet, pine woods smell, to marshes full of cattails with stalks higher than our heads. The wetlands were full of waterfowl. It seemed…
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