Announcement: Small River Canoe Adventures of Wisconsin
First published in 1999, “Small River Canoe Adventures of Wisconsin” is a water trail guide for Wisconsin. What makes it unique is that it covers many VERY obscure creeks and rivers normally skipped by other paddling books. I’ve been a big fan of this guide and have used to find many fantastic water trails (eg Halls Creek, Morrison Creek, Upper Neenah Creek, etc…), but sadly the book is out of print and tough to come by. However, I recently obtained permission from the author Frank Piraino to report his book as a PDF on this site.
Note, the download is quite large at 61 MB. Also in some cases information is now a bit out-of-date (dams have been removed, logjams have filled in some creeks, and even road names won’t match what you see on Google maps). The gazetteer coordinates used for each trip correspond to an older version of “DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer” and may no longer be representative. Physical copies of the book are available at the Madison PL-Hawthorne and Sauk City libraries.
Thanks to Frank for all his hard work and for making this guide available to the public!
Thanks for the resource, coincidently I just happened to stumble across it at the downtown library in Madison last week, so it is available there as well, and thus you should be able to get it delivered to your local library through the inter-library loan program.
The first edition is available at Baraboo and Madison PL-Central libraries. The revised edition (which includes more trips) is available at the Madison PL-Hawthorne and Sauk City libraries.
Frank’s book is a classic “period piece” of Wisconsin river adventures. He was out there on obscure streams before most of us knew they were there. Aaron’s caveats about dated material are well placed.
The beauty of downloading it is you can keep this under the seat of your car and spill coffee and beer and river water on it and make it your personal classic.
Thanks for this wonderful paddling book!