Tales of ambition, terror, rivalry, adventure, endurance, friendship, and love on the waters of the Mississippi River and beyond.

In this collection of thrilling stories, award-winning writer Frank Bures tells stories as varied as the waters and weather and rhythms of a canoe trip. Bures recounts the terror of two kayakers who barely escaped from the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire in the Boundary Waters. He investigates the talk of two young campers who got a supernatural scare in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park in the 1970s. He provides his insider account of the battle for the Mississippi River paddling record. And much more.

In his longest story, Bures narrates the lost history of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, an annual 450- mile race run on the Upper Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s that gave canoe-racing legend Gene Jensen his start—and which changed the course of modern canoeing. The tale includes the dominance of racers from the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, including many members of the Tibbets family, and the unacknowledged contributions of Ojibwe canoe builders Jim and Bernie Smith, whose design features are now part of the modern canoe-racing landscape.

Pushing the River is an essential read for anyone who loves what legendary canoeist Bob O’Hara called “the sense of perpetual adventure” that comes in the seat of a canoe, where you never quite know what you will encounter around the river’s next bend.

Frank Bures is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Harper’s, Outside, The Atlantic, and many other publications. His stories have been included in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Award-winning author Cary J. Griffith grew up among the woods, fields, and emerald waters of eastern Iowa. His childhood fostered a lifelong love of wild places. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Iowa and an M.A. in library science from the University of Minnesota. Griffith’s books explore the natural world. In nonfiction, he covers the borderlands between civilization and wild places. In fiction, he focuses on the ways some people use flora and fauna to commit crimes, while others with more reverence and understanding of the natural world leverage their knowledge to bring criminals to justice. He is the recipient of a Minnesota Book Award, and a Midwest Book Award. He lives with his family in a suburb of Minnesota’s Twin Cities.