A Fifty-year Odyssey from the Boundary Waters to the Far North
by Ryan Rodgers
Minnesota Press 2026.
Accounts of the Arctic explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have long fascinated me. There are tales of ships locked in by ice, wrecks, hardships endured and the ingenuity of survivors crossing barren lands against the odds. What motivated all these people to explore? The potential for promotion, fame, or riches? Dreams of lands to claim survey and map, valuable minerals to prospect, new trade routes?
Since then, technology has advanced and the climate changed. We have detailed maps from aerial surveys and satellite imagery. We have satellite-based GPS (Global Positioning System), handheld satellite phones to call for help, and longer summer seasons in the arctic and sub-arctic. We can post a daily blog of our expedition progress for the world to see.
There was a slice of time in the 1900s, after the first land explorers and geologists had followed the rivers to the northern seas and told their stories. A time after the bulk of the indigenous population had been cleared from the land and before commercial tour operators began flying customers into the wilderness for travel adventures. A time when canoeists from the southern population belt of Canada, or from northern USA could see plenty of vague spaces and barely accessible places on their paper maps. There was no way to learn more about these places without going there. The wiggly blue lines across the paper maps of the Canadian north-lands represent thousands of miles of waterways across the tundra.
What would motivate someone to explore, by canoe with arm-power, those cold blue lines? You could ask Bob O’Hara, who has spent decades doing just that. That is what Ryan Rodgers did. He took the time to learn about O’Hara’s expeditions, to read his journals and those of some of his paddling partners. He asked questions. He traced by finger, across the paper maps, the routes O’Hara and his companions toiled along with canoes, paddles and portages day after day, week after week, month after month.
You might ask, who was Bob O’Hara, but you would be corrected. You mean, who is Bob O’Hara? Where the Green Light Shines follows how this octogenarian Minnesotan’s early interest in travel by canoe developed into a lifetime obsession. From the Boundary Waters in the 1950s with their wooded shores, he ventured ever farther north. Year after year, he explored beyond the tree line, into the tundra, into ice; west of Hudson bay, north of Hudson Bay, until he tasted the salt water of the Northwest Passage.
The northern Canadian mainland is awash with the lakes and rivers draining the landscape. These waters offer natural, but by no means easy routes downstream to salt water and even more challenging upstream routes from salt water. Not only are the watery routes tricky, with icy water dropping over falls and rapids, but the wind races across the tundra, the lakes and open coast. At times, even in summer the water is frozen. The consequences of spillage are dire.
How much of the brief arctic summer would it take to complete a single route up one waterway and down another? Could it even be done in one season before the weather broke and conditions became untenable? It was impossible to know. Once departed on a trip, O’Hara had no satellite phone to call for an emergency pickup, nobody else to rely on except for his teammates. Adventurers got themselves out of every predicament without outside help, reached their destination or sometimes perished.
For O’Hara, the canoe was the ideal mode of transport; voluminous enough to manage the water conditions carrying essential supplies yet light enough to portage. But going solo was impractical. There is more power, speed and safety with two to a canoe. Likewise, two canoes are safer on a trip than one, especially if a canoe spills. Two canoes make a manageable group; more could become awkward, difficult to keep together even along a stream. Every summer O’Hara gathered a small team of paddling partners and headed north.
In “Where the Green Light Shines” Rodgers traces O’Hara’s life from his early experiences in canoes, with the Boy Scouts in 1955 on the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, to his slide into an almost obsessive relationship with the rivers of the northern Canadian mainland. He gently reveals the man behind the obsession. He neither glorifies, nor attempts to deter or inspire others to follow,
I am familiar with the psychological gradient motivating what O'Hara did. The only way to gain the same level of euphoria the success of an expedition brings is to tackle a bigger challenge. That compulsion consumes rock climbers, sailors, canoeists and kayakers alike. Any lesser achievement than the previous can disappoint, yet ever-increasing challenges carry ever-increasing risks. A hobby becomes an obsession which can become, as in O’Hara’s case, what life is for; his raison d'être.
O’Hara and his teammates reached places where earlier explorers traveled, suffered and perished, crisscrossing barren land, entirely dependent on their own resources. Can we do the same today? Sadly, or gladly depending on your perspective, the O’Hara-style expedition faded with the advent of dry-suits, satellite phones, and global satellite positioning. Remoteness is a gradually dwindling treasure. Roads encroach, there are all-terrain vehicles, guided wilderness expeditions, rapid-rescue options, hydroelectric power schemes. To say it is not the same today is trite. What remains unchanged is the constant change.
Ryan Rodgers’s book plants a milestone, marking an era of adventure across an unforgiving landscape. It is harshly gritty, exposing the acute discomfort of the daily grind to finish a lengthy trip before the onset of winter. But it describes the other side of the coin too, the times when through clear air the horizon seems so far away, it dissolves into a vision of tomorrow. That tomorrow for O’Hara, now in his eighties, is a return to the quiet waters of his youth.
What, you might ask, is the significance of the Green Light? The idiom dates from the 1930s when traffic lights were introduced, but what resonates with me are the lyrics to J.J. Cale’s 1971 song, The Breeze. “I’ve got that green light, babe… I’ve got to keep moving on…” It is easy to see how that concept became a foundation for O’Hara’s expedition philosophy.
This book has earned its place on my bookshelf alongside those accounts of earlier explorers whose very names evoke the northern wilds of Canada.
Ryan Rodgers - University of Minnesota Press 2026
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