This summer, professional paddler Lesley Gaudry of St. Adolphe connected with Madison Eklund, a 26-year-old kayaker making a long and ambitious trek from Fort Snelling, Minnesota to York Factory, Manitoba via the Red River. Eklund is believed to the first person to complete such a trek alone, at least in modern times.
Gaudry owns a business called Nature’s Edge Tourism which aims to explore Manitoba’s waterways from a different perspective—specifically, through stand-up paddleboarding. She teaches on many waterways throughout the province and is active in a number of online paddling enthusiast groups.
That’s where she learned about Eklund’s excursion. And when she realized that Eklund would be coming through this area, Gaudry decided that she wanted to offer to help her in some way.
“I saw her original posting when she was down in Minnesota,” says Gaudry, “and I was like, ‘Oh, she’s coming up the Red River and I live in Ste. Adolphe. How can I help her?’ So I reached out to her and offered to bring her food or take her garbage for her, whatever she needed.”
Eklund and Gaudry began a dialogue. After the two got to know each other, Gaudry even offered her a place to stay for the night so that Eklund could take a break from camping.
“She wasn’t sure if she would make it all the way to St. Adolphe on the particular day we talked about,” Gaudry adds, “so I also told her there was a much better access point in Ste. Agathe, and I picked her up there.”
Gaudry met Eklund at the Ste. Agathe boat launch along the west bank of the Red River.
“As I waited, I saw this singular kayak off in the distance paddling at a steady pace, looking very peaceful in the water. It was the perfect illustration of work and pleasure that paddlers strive for,” says Gaudry. “I waved and watched in awe as Madison launched her fully loaded kayak onto the mud-covered cement base of the boat launch as floodwaters left a three-inch-thick silt covering over the riverbank’s edges. She proceeded to hop out of the kayak, in bare feet, mud slipping between her toes, to pull up her 60-pound kayak with 55 pounds of gear further up the launch, and then greeted me with a big and exhausted smile.”
Gaudry says Eklund had paddled 52 miles that day and was looking forward to eating, having a shower, and getting some sleep.
“We loaded up her gear into my van, then drove 25 kilometres north so she could check out the state of the Red River Floodway gates, which she would be paddling through the next day. We then came back to the house, cooked up some steaks, chatted for a bit, and turned in for the night.”
The next morning, they were up early. Gaudry explains that even though St. Adolphe has river access, Eklund needed to return to the point where she had exited the water so she could justifiably claim to have kayaked the entire journey.
“My son and I drove her back to the Ste. Agathe boat launch,” says Gaudry. “We chatted a bit more while she packed and then, just like a leaf in the wind, she floated away from us down the Red River on to her next destination.”
Eklund’s Expedition
Eklund’s commitment made a considerable impression on Gaudry, who took the opportunity to interview the young woman herself and record the details of her experience. She wanted to get to know Eklund better, to find out what her motivation was for taking on such an immense trip like this one—solo.
Growing up, Eklund lived in upstate New York near the Adirondacks where she had access to many outdoor activities like hiking, skating, swimming, and rock-climbing. In the winters, she got into ice-climbing, snowshoeing, and mountaineering and in summer she visited her grandparents in Maine, where she learned to kayak.
“I started kayaking when I was about six or seven, so roughly 20 years,” says Eklund. “The neighbour’s son would always go out kayaking. I thought it looked so cool and fun and wanted to do it too. I guess I never shut up about it, because my grandparents finally went and asked the neighbours if I could borrow their kayaks when they weren’t using them. They agreed, and my addiction started.”
Eklund practiced basic skills for several years, becoming a confident kayaker and swim instructor. She made it a priority to take a seven-mile kayak trip every year, but it wasn’t until she moved with her husband to Grand Forks, North Dakota that she got the idea to embark on a longer expedition.
While planning the route, Eklund connected with locals in Grand Forks and learned about two other women who had recently completed the same route she was considering.
In the end, the 2,400-kilometre trip took four and a half months, starting on the Minnesota River and traveling upstream against spring floodwaters. She passed through Odessa and made her way through a chain of small lakes, eventually arriving at Wahpeton, North Dakota to embark on the Red River.
At Grand Forks, she met up with her husband to close on the house they had purchased and then went on to cross into Canada and reach Ste. Agathe—to meet up with Gaudry—in mid-July. Lake Winnipeg gave her some challenges, and after two and a half weeks traversing the lake she made it to Berens River and on to Norway House. From Norway House, she made her way to the Hayes River and then down to York Factory.
That makes it sound easy, of course, but the distances are vast and the conditions often difficult.
Eklund told Gaudry that the Red River between Emerson and Winnipeg was one of her favourite sections of the entire trip.
“I loved this section!” Eklund says. “It was my first experience interacting with Manitobans on a personal level and the license plate is not wrong. You are all so friendly! There are more access points [to the river] than in the States, so the mud was less of a nuisance. It was very active and I started to see more people out recreating than in the U.S.”
A trip of this magnitude requires project management skills and planning down to the tiniest detail. To fund her trip, Eklund budgeted $1,000/month in personal savings. She also secured grant funding from various sources, including the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality, with whom she worked to conduct water sampling along the U.S. portion of the Red River.
The intricate network of waterways combined with the size of the map she wanted to cover, not to mention the sheer volume of equipment required to accomplish the journey, made planning one of the more challenging aspects of the journey. It was an intensely complicated trip for any experienced kayaker to undertake.
In addition to acquiring gear, finding maps for the route—then finding other maps, and still others, when the original “sucked”—and connecting with people along the way, she had to arrange a remote border crossing with Canada Border Services. She also had to arrange transportation home from York Factory—twice, since the first arrangement got suddenly cancelled. Overall, there were a huge number of logistics to master.
Then there was obviously her ability to avoid injury and maintain physical health over such a long journey. Though physical fitness is a consideration for anyone an extended trek over land or water, Eklund says there’s no way to properly prepare your body for what it takes to self-propel for several months at a time.
“Everyone thinks you need to have a crazy workout plan, but any thru-hiker will tell you there’s really no way to prepare,” she says. “No one- to two-hour gym routine compares to eight- to twelve-hours of repetitive motion in a boat other than doing it for real. I did go to the gym, but it didn’t do much. The parts I worked out still hurt at the start, and there were many muscles I didn’t expect to hurt that did.”
Eklund is particular about her diet and nutrition, however, and spoke with a registered dietician to plan her meals and camp food in order to maintain a balanced diet. This is especially important because she has Celiac disease.
“Gluten-free food can be extremely hard to find, and the U.S. and Canada have very different labelling laws,” Eklund muses. “Not knowing the safety or availability of gluten-free food, I chose to buy it all in advance and ship myself resupply boxes for the entire route. I could still supplement with food in town if I found some, but this took the stress off going without.”
Intellectually and emotionally, long-distance kayaking is an intense undertaking. Loneliness ended up being the hardest part of the entire endeavour, according to Eklund, and not something she thought would affect her to the extent it did.
“You’ve got to be tough mentally to finish a long-distance trip. It’s lonely, it’s sometimes boring, it’s hard work, and sometimes it’s scary. It’s also painfully beautiful and an awesome experience.”
The support of Eklund’s husband and family was an integral part of the trip. She said her parents worried about her constantly but were supportive because they knew she had set her mind to accomplishing her goal.
And despite being newly married and in the middle of moving across the country, her husband was her biggest fan.
“He was so motivating and would call and talk to me on tough days,” says Eklund. “As connection got limited and days got tougher, he’d check in with motivational messages for me.”
To anyone who may be thinking of doing some sort of long-distance experience, she absolutely recommends it.
“I can’t tell you how many people on my route told me, ‘I wanted to do a trip like yours when I was young’ and they never did it!” she says. “Life has a habit of getting in the way. Life, taxes, bills, kids, family, schooling, a strict boss/job… there’s always something. But life is too short to delay.”