A couple months back, I paddled the last segment of the Minnesota River that Fritz Ohnsorg had left in his attempt to paddle every river in the area. Here’s the story about it for the story I wrote about it for the Minnesota Star Tribune:

He’s spent 40 years trying to paddle every river near the Twin Cities: After more than 2,000 miles, Fritz Ohnsorg can count the waterways remaining in his life’s project on two hands.

One morning this summer, I pulled into a boat ramp along the Minnesota River. The sky was sharp blue and full of clouds as big as mountains. The air was cool and the river was calm. It was a perfect day for paddling.

Fritz Ohnsorg, 68, and Pete Levi, 67, were already waiting for me at the ramp. We were going to canoe a final 15-mile segment of the Minnesota River that the duo hadn’t yet finished. It was part of a 40-year paddling project Ohnsorg started in the late 1980s, when he looked at a map and saw how much flowing water there was close to his St. Paul home. He set a goal to paddle every navigable waterway that could be reached within a two-hour drive.

“I just realized there are a lot more rivers than anyone could ever imagine,” he says. “So I kept a running list of possible rivers to paddle. There are 82 independent rivers and streams, and most of them have turned out to be canoeable. Some are five or six days long. That’s a lot of canoeing.”

Read the rest here.