Cory Maria Dack is an outdoor adventure guide and she recently completed a thru-paddle of the entire Mississippi River. It took her 134 days to canoe from the headwaters of the river in Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Cory Maria Dack is an outdoor adventure guide and she recently completed a thru-paddle of the entire Mississippi River. It took her 134 days to canoe from the headwaters of the river in Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. At the end, she didn't necessarily feel a sense of victory. Instead, she felt joy and gratitude for her new relationship with the river and the people she met along the way.
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The Mississippi River, first and foremost is sacred. She is sacred and she is powerful. And the Mississippi River is not a thing that you conquer. It is a living thriving being that you ask for safe passage and hope that it grants you.
Cory Maria Dack doesn't think of rivers, mountains, or oceans as obstacles to be overcome. Her perspective is different from how we often think about outdoor adventuring. When we talk about sports like running or mountaineering, we frequently use words such as tackle or conquer, as if these natural elements are something to be battled. It's true that struggling through adversity can lead to feelings of triumph and satisfaction. But Cory's take is that we ask nature for permission, for good conditions and for safety as we adventure outside. Cory is an outdoor adventure guide and she recently completed a thru-paddle of the entire Mississippi River. It took her 134 days to canoe from the headwaters of the river in Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. At the end, she didn't necessarily feel a sense of victory. Instead, she felt joy and gratitude for her new relationship with the river and the people she met along the way. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. Cory Maria Dack, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Hello. Hello. I'm really excited to be here.
I like that you said you're a three name person. What does that mean?
Yeah, so Cory Maria Dack, a lot of people just call me Cory, but Cory Dack sounds sort of like a white frat boy, and people are often surprised when they see an Indigenous Latina woman show up, so that Maria is very important.
I love that. That made me laugh. Where did you grow up?
Well, I was born in Quito in Ecuador, but I was adopted when I was three months old and I grew up in Minnesota.
Well first of all, I love Ecuador. That is so cool that you're born there. Beautiful place.
Yeah, it's so beautiful.
But I've never met someone mean from Minnesota.
I like that. I like that. Let's keep that going Minnesotans. Let's keep that going.
So what do you do for work? I usually don't ask that to begin with, but I'm just curious.
Well, that's appropriate because my wild idea came from work. I am a guide in outdoor recreation and if you had told me as a child I would grow up and take people on outdoor adventures, I would have definitely not believed you because growing up I was really interested in marching band and show choir and Broadway musicals. And also my family did not have the financial means to go on wild adventures. So I didn't ever really grow up camping, even though I'm from Minnesota and that's where the boundary waters are located, which is just a million acres of pristine, pure water.
It's one of those beautiful places in the world. But I had never been there until I was 24 years old and it was staff training to be a canoe guide that summer. I had never been on a canoe trip. It was a totally different life path than what I would've guessed for myself. And on that trip in 2007, my first time in the boundary waters, I cried every single day on trail. I cried every day. I was like this, "This was a mistake. What was I doing?" I have to take care of people, I have to make sure nobody dies. I need to stir in a canoe, use a map and come cook over a fire. What was I thinking? And I said, "Cory Maria, it's all right. You can do anything for one summer." And lo and behold, here we are, 16 years later, still going strong.
Oh my God, I love meeting women guides. That is so cool that you're a guide professionally. So wait, how did you get into paddling? You grew up in Minnesota. What are you going to do something else for your career, but somehow you became a guide. How did this happen?
I see guiding as another form of being a teacher. And I was going into education in general, so that felt very natural to me. I worked for a place called Camp Vermilion and I showed up as a brand new green camp counselor. So the kids would come and stay for a week in cabins, like capture the flag arts and crafts, that kind of summer camp. But they also had a tripping portion where guides would take people for five days into the boundary waters. So camping and cooking over fires and pooping in holes and all that good stuff. And I remember looking at that job and being like, "No way. Absolutely not."
I'm here because I love kids and I love teaching and I'm in education. But then as soon as I thought that, I felt kind of in my bones, like "Cory, when you say things like that, you end up doing them." And I thought, I don't know if I have that skillset. Do I really fit in here? That's kind of hardcore. And I had friends in that community that said, "We can teach anyone to paddle, we can teach anyone to use a map, encompass or build a fire. But what we can't teach is how to build community and how to empower youth. And you do that already, so you're already ready."
Cory was a natural teacher. She was already getting a degree in education when she fell in love with canoeing. An academic advisor suggested she get a master's degree in outdoor recreation, which Cory didn't even know was an option. That degree led her to pursue river guiding full-time. She really connected with the opportunity to build community on the water. After years of leading different groups on canoe trips around the country, Cory became deeply curious about the Mississippi River. So how did you get this wild idea to thru-paddle the Mississippi did? One day you wake up and you're like, I'm just going to thru-paddle the Mississippi.
It was such a slow burn. I mean, when I started guiding in 2007, those trips were five days long, which were really, really, really long trips.
That is a long time on the water.
Is it a long time on the water. I never thought I would do 134-day trip all the way down the Mississippi. But every year I kept going on longer and longer trips depending on what job contracts I received. And one year there was a program called the River Semester, which is like a study abroad for college students. But you spent the whole semester taking full courses on the Mississippi River. So it was myself and a co-guide, and then we also were instructors and then two full-time professors and 15 college students. And we did a hundred-day canoe trip from Minneapolis to Karo, Illinois, which is the great confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. I think anywhere two giant bodies of water meet, there is a lot of deep magic there.
And so while on that trip you can't help but wonder what does the river look like? And that was in 2018 and that little seed was planted. And once Covid hit, everything was put on hold. I was living in Minneapolis. Side story. I was living in Ecuador when covid hit this hemisphere and I ended up being trapped there in extreme military lockdown for 70 days. I could not leave the country. And we had extreme military lockdown, like nationwide curfew from 2:00 PM in the afternoon until 6:00 AM and I finally made it back to Minneapolis on Sunday, May 24th, 2020. And the next day George Floyd was murdered.
And from that moment on, I was running full-time as a volunteer street medic during all of the uprisings for everything, everything was on fire. And I think fire is really important. We talk about in nature, fire is always this bad thing, but natural fire is so restorative. I think about the Jack Pine and how the Jack Pine has those serrated p ine cones and they only open to seed in the heat of fire. And that summer was a huge phoenix Jack Pine cones summer for me. And that directly informed me on how I wanted to go down the Mississippi. I needed to bring stories of people down the river and hear stories that stood for helping to pick apart and overcome systemic violence that we all suffer from every day.
Let's dive into that a little bit more. Like this was a big, big why. So what was kind of your mission and how did you do things a little differently than just paddle down a river?
We decolonized thru-paddling, which is a play on words, so decolonization, there's a lot of ways to look at that, but the way that we use it the most was to decolonize something, is to really think about why we do the things we do and say the things we say and think the things we think. And how is that informed by really violent systemic oppression? So I'm talking racism, I'm talking misogyny, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, all these big nasty systems can really inform why we do and say the things we do and say. And so decolonizing thru-paddling, thru-paddling is a noun to thru-paddle something like to through hike something from start to finish and then decolonizing through the act of paddling. And so we wanted to talk about these hard things on the river. We wanted to be in touch with Indigenous peoples and water protectors all along the river, which we were. And we wanted to prioritize meeting people and being community versus trying to break a speed record.
Cory linked up with a paddling partner and set off on her journey on August 21st, 2022. As they paddled down the river, they met with Indigenous leaders, performed ceremonies and organized community gatherings. From start to finish, Cory canoed more than 2,500 miles in 134 days. When we come back, Cory tells us about making offerings to the river, talks in detail about the Mississippi and shares stories of the river angels she met along the way.
Cory Maria Dack canoed more than 2,500 miles down the Mississippi River in 134 days. She had three different paddling partners that joined her for different sections of the journey. Sometimes they camped on shore and other nights they stayed with river angels. They entered a long winter, navigated around dangerous barge traffic and made treacherous river crossings. While they encountered a lot of challenges, Cory's Indigenous background has taught her to be intentional and respectful in nature. For example, every day Cory and her paddle partner would make an offering to the river as a gesture of gratitude.
We wanted to be in deep relationship with the water and the land and the original caretakers, which would be the different native nations and Indigenous people that live along the water. And so friends who were Ojibwe, Dakota, and Cherokee all told me that every day we should offer asemaa, which is the Ojibwe word for tobacco to the water. And every single day we would have our boats all full loaded up, ready to go. Or if it was just me and one person, which most of the time it was our canoe named Little Mama. Little Mama was ready to go. But we would stop and we would offer tobacco to the water. And I'm Ecuadorian, Native American and I know a little bit of words in Quechua. So I'd speak to the water in Quechua, in Spanish, and in English, and we would offer asemaa in your left hand, the tobacco to the water as our Native American friends taught us.
And we would thank the water, we would ask for safe passage and we would always say, "Water, we love you. Water, we thank you water, we respect you, water, we protect you." And then at the end of every single day, no matter what happened, no matter how fun and rambunctious or how scary and dangerous, when we got to wherever we were stopping for the night before we unloaded the boats, we would offer asemaa again because my friend Jada Gray Eagle taught me that you also needed to offer tobacco at the end of your day so that the water spirits and your ancestors, they knew that you had gotten there safely, that they had gotten you safely, and that they could rest as well because they also needed to rest so that they would have energy to help you the next day. So it was deeply relational.
And so we had a ceremony like that at the headwaters of Lake Itasca on our launch day on August 21st. My dad was there, family, friends, there's a lot of media there. And we sang a song to the water. And then I think we had maybe a dozen people in canoes cross part of Lake Itasca with us all the way to the headwaters where the Mississippi River starts, where she's so beautiful and sacred and tiny in her infancy, you walk across the Mississippi, you just walk right across her. And so we did that and offered more tobacco. And the first mile or two, we walked our canoe. It was like a little dog because it was too shallow to paddle. We actually had all of our gear. We sent a couple miles down river and picked it up at a bridge or a little stopping spot because we couldn't load our canoes because the water was so low. And so that's what we did to start the journey.
Cory began the journey at Lake Itasca Headwaters in Northern Minnesota. Over the course of the next 2,500 miles, the landscape of the Mississippi changes quite a bit. There are parts where the river is tiny and quiet and other parts where it's a major commerce corridor. Cory broke down the river for me, segment by segment. The Mississippi River is just this incredibly large river. It's super important. So much happens on it. There's so much history, there's so much different wildlife. What part was dangerous and scary?
That's a great question. I think of the Mississippi in five parts. There's the headwaters to Minneapolis. The Mississippi River in her infancy is so sacred. The upper, upper river winds through this labyrinth of wild rice beds, which are also sacred to Indigenous peoples. And then once you get further, there's different dams you have to portage around. There's no locks until you hit Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin cities. So from the headwaters to Minneapolis, lots of nature. And then from Minneapolis to St. Louis are the locks and dams. So that is another section.
And the danger there is the traffic, you can have a tug or toe with up to 15 barges attached and you need to make sure that you stay out of their way. Barges are very, very dangerous and they can't see you. The lock and dam systems kill the current. So it's essentially 700 miles of lake paddling, which I think in the summer could be lovely, but was kind of excruciating in the winter because there was no current, it kills the current. And so we went about two to three miles an hour, which is really slow when you're really cold. I do not recommend thru-paddling in the winter. I really don't.
Wow. I can imagine cold, miserable, what do you wear? How do paddle?
It's so terrible. You can get good gear for doing a long hike in the winter, but as you know, when you're canoeing, you're sitting. And so I think the coldest we paddled in the day was 17 degrees. And honestly, that was a suffer fest. That's not even really fun to remember. It's not even type two fun. It's not even fun now. It was awful. And there are times where it was so painful. If you tip in the Mississippi or anywhere in the summer, as long as you're not going to get hit by a barge, that could be potentially fun. Maybe you cool off, you're close to the shoreline, but if you tip in the winter, you can die. So section two would be Minneapolis, St. Louis and the lock and dam system. From St. Louis to Baton Rouge would be section three.
After St. Louis, there are no more lock and dams, so it's just free flowing river. And the current is so fast, it really was like a whole new ballgame. But with that you have to be 10 times as careful because if you saw a parked barge, even just a parked one, you fleeted against the bank. If you hit it head on, you could get sucked underneath it because of the current on the upper river. But on the lower river, the current is so strong that even if you're paddling alongside a barge, if you were too close, like a parked barge, no motors, if you were too close, you'd get sucked underneath it and you would die. Our marine radio was our most important piece of equipment because we had an app on our phones and we would look at the name of the traffic and I would call... So let's say I'd see a barge and it was called the Shelby. And I'd say Southbound canoe to the Shelby may southbound canoe to the Shelby May.
And then legally it's federally binding, if you call on a tug or toe or an ocean liner or anything by name, they have to respond. And we would let them know our location just so they could look out for us and not hit us and not have us get sucked under. And then section four would be Baton Rouge to essentially the ocean, especially Baton Rouge to New Orleans is known as the chemical corridor or cancer alley because a lot of people have a higher rate of cancer in that area. And we never once drank from the Mississippi, but we certainly never would have down there. And then the last section would be when you get to River Miles Zero. And those last 12 miles reminded me of the headwaters and it really brought us to tears. We were back in tall grasses. There were herons and egrets and eagles. The water was calm, the river was small. After all of that really intense danger of the chemical corridor to do those last 12 miles was such a gift. Pacha mama, she blessed us.
Cory couldn't have completed this thru-paddle without help from her community. She had her paddle partners and a support team that traveled along the river by van for the second half of the journey. Another profound presence on the trip were the Trail Angels, or in this case, River Angels.
You've probably heard of Trail Angels, right?
I actually just spent time with a Trail Angel.
Well, just like on the Appalachian Trail or the PCT or CDT, there are Trail Angels all along the Mississippi River. They literally saved our lives at times, like not hyperbole, have saved our lives at times. Trail Angels on the Mississippi is different in that all the way from Lake Itasca, the headwaters to St. Louis and a little beyond, people live right on the river. I would get on social media and say, "My name's Cory. I'm thru-paddling with this many people. We're about 70 miles north of Dubuque, Iowa." And people would come out of the woodwork to us and reach out and say, "I live at River Mile 724 if you want a hot shower in a warm bed and we'll take you grocery shopping and you can refill drinkable water and I'll make you dinner." To decolonize this, we wanted to spend time with people.
And so spending time with Trail Angels was always part of the plan, part of the dream, getting to hear their stories and share our stories. There was a river angel named Sandy Broman Chinkle, shout out to Sandy. She's one of our first river angels up in the Grand Rapids, Minnesota area. And we had two dams we needed to ridge around in that area and we had all of her stuff. And she said, "Why don't you just spend a second night here with me?" Because she loved hosting thru-paddlers and she and her husband are just iconic river angels on the upper river. She said, "Leave all your stuff here and why don't you paddle without all of your gear and I'll pick you up at the end of the day and take you home. You could have another night with us." And so she helped us birth the idea of day tripping.
And we did that all the time for fun at first. And then we did that constantly for survival. When we were in the quad cities in the most miserable of winter, River Angels day tripped with us all the time because it was too cold to be sleeping out at night in a summer tent with summer gear. And a lot of people in the padding community reached out to me and they were like, "I don't know why I never did that. Why did I only have one night with River Angels and then never saw them again? How beautiful that you were able to deepen your relationship with the River Angels because you stayed for a second night." So many people have that sort of colonized, I got to beat the miles, I got to crush the wind, I got to go fast. And sometimes there are days where we want it to go hard and fast, but sometimes doing so means that you missed out on the human connection.
Well, I think sometimes when we take the scenic or the slow route, that's kind of when the best magic happens.
Absolutely.
How did the adventure change you, looking back on it now?
One of the greatest gifts of adventure like this is that I think it will keep changing me forever. If I am a carved thing and the water is what carves me over time, you think of how long it takes water to carve a canyon, I feel like I'm just barely scratching the surface of how this journey will continue to change me my whole life, which is such a gift. And in the more immediate future, it was such a reminder of what I am capable of because this was hard. There were times where this was a suffer fest. There were times where I had to fight every imposter syndrome voice in my head, all the systemic oppression that I've internalized because I'm just a normal human being and we all do. When we hit winter, there was just a part of me that said things like, "This is your fault."
"You went too slow. You weren't good enough, you weren't strong enough, you weren't fast enough." Even though the reason we were such stuck in deep winter was for stuff that was just objectively not my fault, not our fault. It's still, that was like a voice I had to fight. And I think something that a trip like this has the opportunity to teach us is that it's not that you overcome those voices or those insecurities by never having them surface. It's that when they surface, you know how to be like, "Absolutely not. I'm strong, I'm powerful, I'm beautiful, and I'm doing my best." And I was leaving voice messages for myself on my phone, just like little diaries throughout the whole trip. And every day when I finished talking about my day, I would say, "I love you, Cory Maria. You're doing your best. And I'm proud of you."
Cory completed her journey down the Mississippi on March 5th, 2023. It didn't take her long to get right back to leading canoe trips. This summer, Cory is guiding three young women on a 40-day whitewater canoe trip through the frigid Northwestern territories of Canada. Cory Maria Dack, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. If you want to see pictures of her trip, check out Cory's Instagram @CoryMaria13. That's C-O-R-Y M-A-R-I-A 1-3. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow this show, when you rate it, and when you take the time to write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.