Not Your Typical Source to Sea

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"When we got to Minneapolis I was basically dragging my feet and I was very unsure and felt the need to tap out."

"But you did it, so what changed?"

"I think I just got stuck on the boat. And so I never got out. And I'm really grateful that I didn't. We're so conditioned by stories and to follow the examples of the stories that have come before us. I've never had anybody in my life do a trip down a river or ever heard of a story of someone doing something like this so it seemed out of my reality. The idea of it scared me so much. It's a big adventure."

A source to sea trip down the Mississippi River. As a student at the University of Puget Sound and a member of the rowing team for all four years, Audra Tromly found herself in an independent class in the spring of her senior year which led to a trip down the river later that year. Along the way her and her team would collect water samples to shed some light on the micro plastics island floating in the Gulf of Mexico as well as to better understand the affects of the watershed in relation to the chemical composition of the river. She got what she bargained for and more and has one hell of a story to tell about it.

"All of the decisions in my life have been gut feeling decisions. And I just knew that I should do it and it really freaked me out but I had that gut feeling that I should go on this trip"

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Travel On Paddle On: So Audra, thanks for doing this. Let's talk about your trip down the Mississippi. You paddled from source to see, right?

Audra: Yes. So Lake Itasca, and it's debated on where the headwaters of the Mississippi are. Our campground was across Lake Itasca so we first paddled across the lake, portaged over the little dam on the other side and then we paddled all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

TOPO: What was the water like right at the beginning? I know it varies depending on when you go. Did you have an easy time for the first few miles or was it really shallow with a lot of logs and debris?

A: It was super shallow and we had our two canoes. One of the canoes had our Google tracker on it so we had pontoons attached to each side to add stability but that made it heavy and wide and with the Google tracker standing tall we were having to machete our way through a ton of stuff. I had a scar on my leg for a really long time from cutting a branch out of the way. So the first day we only went about four miles and we were sooo frustrated because everyone thought we were going to go further.

TOPO: Alright so let's back up, you had a Google tracker. So, purpose of the trip, explain that.

A: Yeah, so I was with an organization called OAR Northwest and they do big adventures and stop along the way or post trip and talk to students about it. So it's the idea that you're bringing adventure into the classroom. As part of this trip there were five us who were in the boats and we were working with a couple of different partners to do multiple different things. We had the Google camera to map the river and produce street cam images of the river. We were working with three different universities to collect samples of the river. Here we were looking for micro plastics, oxygen levels and nitrate levels. This became particularly important the further down the river we went. There are 31 states that have water that feed into the Mississippi and a lot of those go through farmlands. So you're studying what is coming into the river as you go down from all of these watershed areas.

TOPO: 31 states?! That's a big watershed.

A: It's a huge watershed. Which is so cool, it touches over half of the United States. That's why the Mississippi is such an amazing river. It's the backbone of so many different cultures in the United States. And then we were stopping and talking to students along the way. We talked to 52 different schools and somewhere in the range of 5,000 students from Kindergarten to Grad students. So along the way we were stopping at towns, spending the night there and then going to various schools.

TOPO: So this was a very planned out trip. Stops were planned prior to even leaving the headwaters?

A: Yeah, we had a spreadsheet of our stops that was drafted months before we left.

TOPO: Alright, so the first day you only went four miles and you thought you'd go further. Did varying progress each day make the spreadsheet with the planned stops hard to keep on schedule? If a month down the road you were scheduled to stop at a school did you make it on time?

A: Yeah we were varying on time. The first 21 days from Itasca to Minneapolis, while we were still in canoes, we didn't have any school stops planned and we weren't doing a ton of water samples. The idea behind that was to allow us time to get used to being on the water for an extended period of time. That and there just aren't really a lot of big towns during that stretch.

TOPO: Yeah that first 500 miles is really just back water meandering through wetlands. Then from Minneapolis it kind of is a pipeline down, right? It opens up and has a stronger current and is a wider river?

A: More or less. I mean it grows and grows and grows. So that's part of the mythology of the river. Everywhere you go you'll hear someone say "this river is super dangerous, it's super big it's super wide". And then you go another 100 miles and it becomes bigger and wider and more dangerous. So everyone kind of thinks that their spot on the river is the most exciting and the most dangerous. We were paddling for a couple of weeks during flood stages. There were days when we would have navigation buoys floating passed us because they got completely uprooted or logs floating passed us. But we were moving slow and all of that stuff was moving slow so you can move out of the way pretty easily. I think the most dangerous thing was when we couldn't find campsites for the night because the water was so high. And even then we would just tie up to trees and camp out in our rowboats.

TOPO: Rowboats? But you started in canoes, when did you transition to rowboats?

A: Right, so the first 21 days between Itasca and Minneapolis there are no locks so we were able to portage the canoes. That was a big part of why we had canoes because they're lighter and easier to portage especially during the shallow water near the headwaters. So that's why we were in canoes for the first stretch. But the heart of OAR Northwest really stems from rowing so rowboats are really part of the foundation for these adventures. Once we hit Minneapolis the river gets deeper and portages are traded for locks so 250 pound rowboats made a lot more sense than the canoes. They allowed us to spread out a little more and made the paddling easier from there.

"The only time we had an issue was after we snapped an oar because we weren't paying attention and ran into a parked barge"

TOPO: Was this the first Google mapping attempt of the Mississippi River?

A: It was.

TOPO: And this was in 2016. So in 2016 the Mississippi was mapped using Google cameras to produce street view images. That's exciting.

A: Well, about half of the river was. Google trackers aren't really designed to be camping outside for 100 plus days. They're very bulky. We did break one camera and had to get another one sent out to us halfway through.

TOPO: How many Google cameras did you have with you?

A: Two.

TOPO: So these are towers that are in the middle of the boat that have a 360 degree camera attached to it?

A: Yep. And they take two giant batteries that basically run for about three hours. That became the limitation. However, there are River Angels along the river similar to those that you'd find along the PCT or the Appalachian Trail that are so excited to help out paddlers on the river. We didn't really need anything from them except to charge these batteries. So they would take these batteries from us, bring them home to charge them and then bring them back to us. So that was a big hurdle. We didn't have the capability to really charge these batteries on our own. Ultimately, us getting to all of these places that we were scheduled to get to on our spreadsheet was more important than capturing images of the river.

"At the Gulf of Mexico there is a huge micro plastic island and we're trying to figure out where that's coming from. It could be coming from currents in the ocean or it could be flowing into the Gulf from the Mississippi"

TOPO: So mapping the river was convenient since you were going on this trip anyway but it wasn't priority number one. Did you approach Google or did Google approach you?

A: We approached them. This was the second time that OAR Northwest had travelled down the Mississippi. The first time was asked them if we can do it and Google didn't really know who we were and wasn't willing to give us one of their expensive cameras. So after the first trip OAR Northwest wrote a 100 page trip report and sent it to Google explaining their trip and saying hey can we have a couple of your cameras now. So we built up our street cred.

TOPO: And what about the science, can you explain a little more about what you were trying to gather there?

"We were testing oxygen levels and nitrogen levels and chemicals that were coming into the main stream as it joined the current. Micro plastics were better tested in the current but the chemical composition of the water could be tested anywhere"

A: Yeah, right at the Gulf of Mexico there is a huge micro plastic island and we're trying to figure out where that's coming from. It could be coming from currents in the ocean or it could be flowing into the Gulf from the Mississippi. So periodically we would stop all paddling and just do science. We were taking water samples and running test strips and we had a giant net that we were towing behind us to see if we would gather any amount of micro plastics.

TOPO: So the water samples probably had to come from a portion of the river that was in the current as opposed to along the shore.

A: If we could, yeah. But a lot of it too was testing the watershed. So we were testing oxygen levels and nitrogen levels and chemicals that were coming into the main stream as it joined the current. Micro plastics though, yes were better tested in the current but the chemical composition of the water could be tested anywhere.

TOPO: And three years later is there a definitive answer on where these micro plastics are coming from. Whether it's from the ocean currents or from the Mississippi itself.

A: Well we passed our information onto scientists at LSU, Louisiana State University, who are working on multiple year thesis's. This will be a long term study and we simply provided them with one source of data. So at this time there is no definitive answer.

TOPO: So to answer this question, scientists are trying to lean on as many sources as they can to collect as much data as they can and your expedition provided one of those sources. That's great. Let's move on to life on the river. Total distance and total time?

A: It was about 2,300 miles and we were on the river for 104 days. We officially put in August 15th and we took out the day after Thanksgiving.

TOPO: That's a long time. So roughly 20 miles a day with shorter days here and longer days there.

A: Right yeah there were some days when we weren't even on the river because we were in town talking to schools and things like that. That's what took so long, if you were to do just source to sea you could do it much faster. Most people do it in about half the time.

TOPO: Alright so what's it like living on the river and out of your boat for 104 days?

A: I guess it just kind of depended on what night it was. Sometimes it would feel really exhausting and we were all a little irritated with each other and we had the feeling of I've seen you for too much of my day and I don't want to talk to you anymore. But most of the time it was really fun. All of us who went on the trip knew each other before leaving but we weren't really close so it was fun to become better friends as the trip went on. Our group was really good at having open conversations. It also helped that we had a sort of leader with one individual in our party, Jordan who was spearheading this whole trip. He called the shots of this is how we're going to do things and this is what's going to happen every night. That helped eliminate group bickering and unnecessary debates. We got into a nice rhythm with that. And still, some nights someone would carry more of the load and some nights others wouldn't depending on how they were feeling that day. But it all worked out.

"It was about 2,300 miles and we were on the river for 104 days. We officially put in August 15th and we took out the day after Thanksgiving"

TOPO: So you have everything you need on the rowboat, right? And where are you staying along the river? I know there are campsites set up along the river that are river access only sites but there are also sites within state parks, is this mostly where you were staying throughout the trip?

A: That's where we were staying at the beginning and once you get further south there are giant sand banks where we could set up camp. These were the result of the attempt to reconstruct the river to be more of a shipping channel. We would also camp in the forest and really wherever was convenient. A large majority of the land along the Mississippi is public land so you can really stay wherever you want.

TOPO: On the topic of shipping channels. There are some big boats on the Mississippi. Did you run into any trouble there?

A: Yeah afte St. Louis there are no more locks and dams so it pretty much just becomes a working river. We had VHF radios with us so we could radio to all of the ship captains and tell them what we were doing and where we were going to be and when. It was pretty easy to stay out of their way. The only time we had an issue was after we snapped an oar because we weren't paying attention and ran into a parked barge.

TOPO: A parked barge. Came out of nowhere, huh?

A: It was pretty embarrassing because it was in the last couple of days of the trip and we had every reason to be more aware. Other than that no issues.

TOPO: What's it like after 104 days on the river when you're finally done? To wake up in the morning and not go through the daily motions of breaking down camp and start paddling? It's gotta be tough to just stop. Did you get there, meet your destination and think "I guess we're done". Or was there a big celebration. What was it like to paddle for 104 days and then...not.

A: So you get there, but then the furthest town south on the river is 20 miles north of the mouth, so we had to back paddle another entire day upriver. That was an additional 12 hour day. Then we had to meet our shore team in Alabama so that was another 4 hour drive. From there we got about 4 hours of sleep, woke up early to clean all of our gear then we had more schools to visit in New Orleans. There was a lot going on after we finished paddling that didn't really allow the trip to be over.

TOPO: So there wasn't a definitive end. The river end wasn't your end. There was still work to be done.

A: Yeah we were still going to presentations and still working. My parents met up with us in New Orleans and we went out dancing for a night and we all said goodbye at a street corner around 2 in the morning. I remember my parents saying "This is so sad you're not going to see them anymore". And I thought, nope. I'll miss them. But I don't miss them right now. I was ready to not have anymore. It was a long trip. I was ready to be done.

TOPO: How many days after reaching the end of the Mississippi was it until you had a day to just do nothing?

A: It was about a week and half. I was back in Denver and just did hung out.

TOPO: That's tough to finish a long trip like that and at the same time not really finish it. If someone wants to learn more about your trip where can they do that?

A: Anyone can search OAR Northwest on Google, Instagram or Facebook. We documented the entire way so the whole trip can be found with pictures and information along the way. We also have a YouTube channel. Because we were stopping and talking to students we opened up the door for them to send us questions and created YouTube videos of us answering the questions.

TOPO: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Audra. It's an incredible journey.