Photo of Verlon Kruger on the Churchill River in 1989 taken by Jack Drury. (Provided photo)

When it comes to paddling long distances, one person stands out above all others — the short, barrel chested, full-white bearded Verlon Kruger.

My introduction to Verlon was at the beginning of a trip in 1989 down the Churchill River to Hudson Bay. Our float plane had just dropped its last load of canoes and gear on a small remote unnamed lake in Northern Manitoba. We were three miles from our friend Doc Forgey’s cabin on the Churchill River. Our challenge was to get our canoes and all our gear the three miles across black-fly infested muskeg wilderness to the river. In true Kruger fashion, he just put his canoe on his shoulders and headed across the muskeg. I soon followed him. I, however, hardly his equal, dragged the boat over the tundra rather than carrying it.

Our adventure was to be a two-week trip from the cabin to the town of Churchill on the edge of Hudson Bay. Churchill is renowned as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” In the fall, upwards of 100 bears pass through the town when Hudson Bay ices over so they can venture out and hunt seals.

I didn’t know much about Verlon at the time, other than he had just completed a 21,000 mile, two-and-a-half-year trip via canoe from the mouth of the Mckenzie River in the Arctic, to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Over the two weeks I spent with him, I got to know him as a kind, engaging, driven man, who was also a paddling machine. He’d paddle down the river, four strokes on the left, four strokes on the right, four strokes on the left, four strokes on the right, mile after mile, hour after hour. In the evening, he shared stories of his most recent trip and the people he met from government dignitaries to the local natives.

On the return drive home, I visited Verlon at his home in Michigan. While I naturally found him to be an incredible paddler, I also found him to be kind, generous and a man of God.

I learned that he was born in Indiana in 1922 to sharecropping parents and was one of eight children. He joined the Army Air Force during World War II by lying about his age, becoming a pilot, and eventually a pilot instructor. After the war, he became a master plumber, eventually starting a successful commercial plumbing business.

Between his plumbing business and helping his wife raise nine children, he kept plenty busy. Then in 1963, when 41 years old and on a family vacation, he got into a canoe for the first time. He soon fell in love with canoeing and started racing. First paddling an aluminum Grumman with his wife, eventually he designed and built his own racing boats and started paddling with like-minded people. His first long-distance race was the Ely-Atikokan Canoe Race, a 200-mile canoe marathon along the border of Minnesota and Canada. It took five days!

He was hooked. His next adventure was to paddle over 7,000 miles from Montreal to the Bering Sea following the route of the French Voyageurs. The Voyageurs usually took a year to complete it. Verlon and his paddling partner finished it in less than six months.

Five years later with canoe partner Steven Landick, he embarked on the Ultimate Canoe Challenge, a 28,000-mile three-and-a-half-year trip up and down every major drainage in North America. They paddled both the Mississippi River and the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — UPSTREAM!

He took on and succeeded in numerous additional canoe challenges that set Guinness records and made him arguably the world’s greatest canoeist.

When asked what the biggest challenge of his journeys was, he said, “… making the chemistry work between companions.” He must have figured it out because his canoe companions became life-long friends.

After half a lifetime of paddling, he passed away in 2004 at the age of 82.

Whenever I get cocky and think I’ve done something amazing, I’ll meet someone who’s done something twice as amazing. I climbed Denali; Ed Hixson climbed Everest … three times! When I sailed around Newfoundland, I met a family that had just completed sailing from the United Kingdom to Newfoundland.

And when I paddled the 125-miles of the Churchill River, I paddled alongside Verlon Kruger … who in his lifetime paddled over 100,000 miles.