A Paddler’s Friend
Curious paddlers this season are in for a treat. Professor Jon Jensen ’89 and emeritus professor John Moeller, with the help of Luther students and staff, have finished revising the indispensable Guide to the Upper Iowa River.
From left: John Moeller and Jon Jensen '89
Originally published in 1971 by chemistry professor George Knudson, the guide has been a decades-long staple for would-be navigators of the river. Moeller says, “When I came to Decorah in 1981, it seemed like everybody I knew had a copy of it.” Jensen and his family used it when he was a kid, and Jensen picked it up again when he moved back to Decorah in 2002.
The Knudson family, who moved to Decorah in 1948, were avid paddlers, even renting out canoes from their backyard just off campus. George used to lean out over area bridges to paint numbers on them for navigation purposes. (Moeller says old-timers still refer to the bridges by their numbers.) After fielding many requests for paddling advice, George decided to organize what he knew in the original Guide to the Upper Iowa River.
George Knudson
Jensen adds that around this time, national legislation was introduced to start protecting rivers. The Upper Iowa was one of the rivers under consideration, and Knudson became so passionate about it that he even went canoeing with Iowa congressman John Culver to lobby for the cause.
George and his wife, Shirley, died in a plane crash in 1977. As infrastructure, river contours, and information changed, and copies of the guide became scarce, Jensen and Moeller started talking about keeping the guide—and awareness about the river—alive.
In their revised edition, the pair aimed to keep the spirit of the original guide, with its handy size and handdrawn maps. They continued to include information on navigation, flora, and fauna. They built upon Knudson’s sections about natural history and added information on climate change, agriculture, flooding, water quality, and more.
Two Luther professors—with the help of members of the Luther community—recently published a revised version of a 1971 guide to the Upper Iowa River.
Their update has been years in the making. It involved three student researchers—Collin Kern ’20, Jonathan Rivera ’20, and Leif Saveraid ’22—who paddled the entire river in the summer of 2019, as well as artists Rachel Heinrich ’24, Iris Johnson ’20, and Julie (Strom) Hendrickson ’93.
“While so much has changed in the 60 years since George Knudson started canoeing the Upper Iowa River,” Jensen and Moeller write, “the river still has the ability to amaze and transform us.”
The revised Guide to the Upper Iowa River is available at the Luther Book Shop. Profits fund Luther faculty and student research on the natural history and conservation of the river.