Looking for a summer water-based adventure? You could model yours on Alan Walsh’s 2021 Susquehanna River kayak excursion of 290 miles from Sayre to Havre de Grace. If you want to squeeze it in before it gets cold, you might want to start paddling now.

“I started training probably in April [of that year],” recalls Alan, who was seventy-one when he made the trip that July. “I got to where I paddled six hours a day.” He’d go to Rose Valley Lake, near Trout Run, and paddle up one side, back down the other, and then up the middle.

How, what, and why? Alan explains. He and his then-wife, Kathy, former Troy area residents, had been living in Maryland for fifteen years. There was an old stone grist mill near their home, with a mill race you had to drive over to get to their house. It was Deer Creek—Alan notes the Deer Creek headwaters are up in York County—and it had enough water in it to kayak to the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna. There were a lot of people in the area who kayaked, and they decided to try it for themselves.

“We hadn’t kayaked before, so we bought cheap ones and started,” he says. After they moved back to Bradford County, they continued paddling, and then Alan decided he wanted to make the North Branch trek. He used a nine-and-a-half-foot kayak, got himself some detailed maps showing mileage and boat launch locations (those spots sometimes had gazebos, which made for good camping sites), packed his gear (close to 200 pounds in the kayak, including himself), and put in the water on July 5. A paddling pal, Carl Osgood, started the trip with him, but only planned to be on the river one day, so after that Alan was on his own. Really alone sometimes. He says there were days he never saw another boat on the river.

Alan didn’t take a lot of pictures on this trek. Rather, he says, “I wanted to make miles.” And he did—typically thirty to thirty-two miles a day. He did keep a journal, though, and it shows that the first day was a foggy start. But he and Carl saw eagles, and stopped in Towanda for lunch. Most other meals were MREs—aka Meal, Ready-to-Eat, typically used by the military. He bought a package of fourteen (that’s how they come), and says he would eat the main part of it at night and save the dessert portion for breakfast. They contain a chemical that heats them so you don’t need a fire. And, “they have lots of calories in them, which is what you need.”

The second day, he was up at 6:30 and back on the water by 7. It was hot and sunny, with thunderstorms and rain later in the day, “so I got wet.” He camped that night at a place called Schaffer’s Riverside Campground. Some nights, he says, he had a “nice grass mattress.” Others it was “a night on concrete again.” But, “most nights my Hilton was a yoga mat and a tarp.”

Day three, he missed his stop at the end of the day, but found a place to get out at Kingston, across from Wilkes-Barre. The fourth day he ended up at the Berwick Test Track Boat Launch, where a kind stranger helped him get resupplied with water. He carried some water, but also used a LifeStraw, which enabled him to drink right out of the river. Day five it rained, and at about 1:30 it got black with an incoming thunder and lightning storm. He got off to the side, covered up with a tarp, and “must have dozed off.” He woke up, the sun was shining, and he was back on the water about 5:30.

Lightning when you’re on the water and paddling can be a problem, since, as Alan points out, “here you are with a lightning rod in your hands.”

On day six he had two dams to deal with, the Fibri Dam and the Power Plant Dam. He notes in his journal that neither were well-marked. “You come on them really quick. I could have gone over both.” He carried a little two-wheeled cart for portaging, so as not to wear out the bottom of his kayak, but neither of those dams have a portage trail, so he asked the power plant people to take him around the dams, and they did.

On day seven, he was in Harrisburg and stayed with some friends there. “I got to sleep on an air mattress and thought I’d died and went to heaven,” he writes in his journal.

On the eighth day, he tried calling personnel at York Haven, another dam, for a portage, but couldn’t get through to a live person. “I got around,” he says, “but it wasn’t pretty.”

On day nine he made it to the Safe Harbor Dam, where he had to deal with a debris-filled portage route, wrong directions, and an excess of wind and waves, but he “figured things out.” He notes that he wore a life jacket all the while.

“That’s one thing everybody should do. Once you’re in the water, you can’t put a life jacket on.”

The tenth day, July 14, he arrived at the Glow Cove Marina around 11:45 a.m., and a family member got him around the Conowingo Dam. Then Kathy and a boatload of friends escorted him the last couple of miles to Havre de Grace.

At the end of it all, Alan says. “I was glad, and I knew I had accomplished something I set out to do, and I did it myself.” He says there was nothing particularly worrisome about the trip. One night he saw something black and white and thought it might be a skunk, but it turned out to be a cat.

So what’s next? He’d like to get a bunch of people together to do the whole 440 miles—from the Susquehanna’s headwaters in Cooperstown to Havre de Grace.

“Well,” he says. “I have a new kayak, but it doesn’t have the space the old one did.”

He’ll figure it out.

For help figuring out routes and stops on the Pennsylvania sections of the North Branch of the Susquehanna, check out the Endless Mountain Heritage Region online maps and guides for purchase at emheritage.org.