Brian Gnauck and the author contemplating a very old inukshuk above the Kuujua River in the High Arctic.

“Tom, how did you ever pick up your love of canoeing rivers in the far north?”

That question was posed to me about a month ago by my wife Nancy. 

“Well,” I answered, “there were two influencers: Glen and Brian.”

In the first months of 1974, Glen Sorenson, a dear friend I had met in college, asked if I was interested in paddling the Churchill River. We would paddle east from the Saskatchewan border, across northern Manitoba to Hudson Bay. He was recruiting me as a crew for a trip that his previous White Bear Lake neighbor and veteran wild river paddler, Brian Gnauck was putting together. 

It took little time for me to jump at the chance to go on a month long 500- mile paddling adventure. (Since we paddled the Churchill River, a large diversion dam was completed making it a very different flow.)

Nancy’s query released a trove of memories and she sat politely listening as I began sharing. This was a time before there was such a thing as a GPS or satellite phones. With maps and compasses and Brian’s knowledge of the land combined with his skills in paddling whitewater and wilderness tripping, the trip proved to be the catalyst that would ultimately send me on numerous remote, northern Canada trips.

After my shared stories, I wondered aloud how Brian was doing. So the next day I tried calling his Marquette, Michigan home. A recorded message told me his phone was disconnected. No big surprise because he likely had cancelled his landline to go with only his cell phone.

I tried emailing him at the only email address I had from his University of Northern Michigan site.  It bounced back. 

Four years ago Brian retired after serving as a dean and professor at the University of Northern Michigan Business College in Marquette for more than forty years.

I decided to write him a good old- fashioned letter. In the letter I wondered how he was doing with retirement. Given the shackling of the pandemic, I asked if he had any summer adventures planned.  Mostly I told him how much I owed him for sparking my interest and teaching me river skills.

About ten days after I sent the letter, my cell phone rang while I was putting up some firewood. I answered and a woman asked, “Tom Anderson?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Brian Gnauck’s daughter. “(At this point, I felt a surge of dread.) 

Jumping in, I blurted, “Shefali.”

Then I heard crying. In fits and starts as she told me her father had experienced a massive heart attack out in his firewood yard next to his beautiful Lake Superior log home. Brian was 80 years old.

Sniffling she said, “At least he was outside, doing something he loved.” 

After a short chat I hung up and went for a slow walk in our woods.  

I cannot think of a single person who has paddled more Canadian rivers than Brian. By 1987, Brian had paddled more than 9,000 miles of Canadian rivers. And he kept paddling remote rivers well into his seventies.

After getting his doctoral degree from the University of Minnesota in the mid-1960s, he began teaching college courses. This gave him the summers off to travel north to paddle remote rivers. Many years he undertake TWO such paddling trips over a summer. 

He loved maps. He owned all the topo maps of northern Canada and over the winter he would pour over them to study potential river trips. 

As an economist, he had a thing for numbers and he could easily tell you the rate of travel, the drop in a river’s elevation and then tell you how many calories we had to carry. 

He was an excellent trip leader. His skills at organizing and preparing for a trip were second to none. He studied situations and always was calm. He invited discussion when key trip decisions had to be made. 

Brian was always tinkering, sewing, experimenting and making improvements on his gear. Back in the early 1970s, Brian fabricated the first nylon canoe cover or spray skirt I had ever seen. Such a cover made it possible to remain comfortable while paddling in rain and more importantly it helped keep out splashing waves in bad weather or while running whitewater. Now they are considered essential among tripping canoeists.

I learned my skills in whitewater paddling from Brian. He was an excellent whitewater paddler and instructor. Before paddling with Brian I had never heard of a draw stroke, pry stroke, cross-draw stroke, backpaddling, bracing or doing an upstream or downstream ferry. Nor had I ever heard of lining or tracking a canoe.

Of medium build, Brian was an animal on the portages. I once offered to carry his 17-foot Mohawk canoe across a portage but he quickly said he would take it. Beefed up for rugged trips, it turns out his boat weighed in at just over 100 pounds. Brian hoisted the canoe on his shoulders and headed up the hill on the faint portage trail marked by old blaze marks on trees. 

On one northern Ontario trip, he wrapped his canoe around a boulder on a nasty piece of whitewater during flood stage. The gunwales of the canoe were made of ash and both had snapped. Given the remote setting and that it was in the early days of the trip Brian didn’t waste no time removing the splintered rails. Then he took his saw and axe and found the two properly sized alder trees.  He cut and split each of them lengthwise and with the help of his Leatherman knife he fabricated a “new” pair of gunwales that served well to finish the canoe trip.

At the end of each day, after camp was set up and supper was cooking, Brian would always call out, “Cups men!” This was the signal to grab your mug and gather for your ration of gin spiked with a tablespoon of Wylers lemonade mix for a version of “bush gin and tonic.” There was also a toast to the river.

So it seems fitting that tonight, I will enthusiastically call out, “Cups Nancy!” And we will toast Brian and his life of canoe exploration.

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