Paddling Alaska: A Guide to the State’’s Greatest Paddling Adventures

Alaska has few roads and even fewer trails--only a few hundred miles of maintained footpaths exist outside the cities--so paddling the state’s thousands of miles of rivers and lakes is the best way to get off the beaten track. Paddling Alaska describes the best and most accessible routes--forty classics in all, from downtown Anchorage to the Matanuska and Susitna Valleys and the Kenai Peninsula, and from the southern interior north to the Yukon. Carefully chosen to accommodate most beginning-to-intermediate paddlers, each route is within easy driving distance of population centers, providing quick access to wilderness for city residents and visitors alike.

Dan Maclean brings close to four decades of paddling experience, including a decade of Alaska paddling, to this book. He spent five of those summers solo canoeing the five longest rivers in Alaska from beginning to end. His previous guidebook, Paddling the Yukon River and its Tributaries, the result of those journeys, is the first and only guide to paddling the entire 2,000 miles of the Yukon River. It was a finalist for the Independent Publishers Book Award in 2006. Dan Maclean is a high school science teacher and lives with his family in Anchorage.