What is a cedar-strip canoe, anyway? The basic idea behind a cedar-strip canoe is to make a hull of narrow wood strips, each one glued to the next with ordinary carpenter’s glue, and then cover the ...

“So you’re starting to see what I mean about all the sanding?” says Ron Pellinen, my wooden canoe-building mentor, when I walk into his shop on a brisk March morning in Northern Ontario. Perched on an ...

It was, Victoria Gonzalez admitted, her first time in a canoe, despite being of the ripe old age of 9 and living in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But what made this paddle even more special for the Duluth ...

Wayne Valliere picks up a long, thin spruce root — lovingly soaked, stretched and whittled into ribbonlike smoothness. Normally, he would be using the root to sew a traditional Ojibwe canoe, but, for ...

NORTHWEST ANGLE, Minn. -- When a tribal elder on Lake of the Woods saw the birch bark canoe Talon Stammen was building, the native was quick with a quip. "You know they make those in Fiberglas now," ...