The Two Continent Canoe Expedition was undertaken by Verlen Kruger and Valerie Fons. The route took them from Inuvik in the North West Territories of Canada to Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America. __Starting in June, 1986, when the ice breaks at Inuvik, Northwest Territories, the team paddled 1,800 miles up the Mackenzie River. They followed a part of the historic fur trade route through the Native settlements of the NWT and of Saskatchewan and followed the voyageur's Highway to Grand Portage. Routing through Michigan, the team navigated four of the Great Lakes; paddling the South shore of Lake Superior in November, then crossed the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Lake Michigan. There they paddled under the Mackinac Bridge and entered Lake Huron. After paddling past Detroit, they headed into Lake Erie to Toledo, up the Maumee River to Fort Wayne, overland into the Wabash and south across the state of Indiana to the Ohio. Up the Tennessee River, they followed the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway to Mobile, Alabama. From Mobile, they paddled east around the Gulf of Mexico to Miami, Florida. At Miami, the nature of the route changed completely as the team headed across the 2,300 miles of the Caribbean Sea. In two solo canoes, they crossed the open ocean and island-hopped the entire Caribbean Chain. When paddling over 100 island crossings, 10 or 12 times they were out of site of land which forced them to paddle overnight. When the team arrived in Trinidad, they entered South America and headed up the Orinoco River and through the unusual natural canal that connects the Orinoco to the Negro River. Navigating the black waters of the Negro, Verlen and Valerie paddled to the modern city of Manaus at the junction of the Amazon. They then paddled down the Amazon and up the Madeira River. At the source of the Madeira, they faced one of the biggest challenges of the expedition, they carried the boats and equipment overland to a small tributary of the Paraguay River, here they entered the middle of the South American Continent and the large relatively unknown and uncharted region called the Mato Grosso - a land of countless tribes and frightening stories. Before they were finished the team explored all three of the major river systems of the Southern Continent; the Orinoco, the Amazon and the Piranha. The team followed the Paraguay-Piranha River to reach Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they paddled out into the South Atlantic Ocean and down the east coast of South America, into the Straits of Magellan to Punta Arenas, Chile, out through the Patagonia Island System, around Cape Horn and back to Punta Arenas. 21,000 miles in two and a half years from the beginning of this amazing paddling exploration, finishing on March 1, 1989 (excerpted from http://www.krugercanoes.com/pr03.htm, accessed January, 2011).