Pat's Canoeing Page

Canoeing Guides

These are kayaking guides written by me since around 1989 during a number of holidays to the places mentioned. They are copyright to me but you are free to print copies for yourself, you can also edit them and basically do as you like just so long as you credit me (I want to be famous :)), and so long as you also make the original, unaltered source available to others on request. Anyone who kills themselves due to information contained in one of these guides deserves everything they get (and I'm not accepting any responsibility).

If you find the information useful, then I'd be happy to know! And if you think something needs changing then please send me an e-mail and I'll consider it. I'll certainly modify any river which turns out to have been altered since I was last there. So if you use the guide and find that a river has a new hydro-electric project being constructed on it - please, please tell me about it. That way I won't find myself leading a bunch of people over a 40ft barrage again.

Having just been back to the Alps (29 June 1997) the guides for both Northern and Southern alps are in the process of being updated. This has pretty much been done. I also just noticed that I forgot to update the Corsica guide after my last trip - so I have a couple of rivers to add to this one. I'll fix them all eventually.

The guides in various formats

The Southern Alps.

Covers the whitewater rivers of the French and Italian Alps, including the Durance basin, the Isère and Ubaye valleys in France, and the Aosta and Noce in Italy. HTML Postscript

Northern Alps

This booklet covers southern Germany and the Austrian Alps, mainly focusing on the Inn and it's tributaries. HTML not available Postscript

Corsica

A guidebook for the finest whitewater paddling in Europe. Corsica. Go there. You will not regret it. HTML Postscript

Norway

Norway land of the midnight sun, trolls and very scary rivers. This booklet acts as a complement to the Norwegian guidebook "Elvepadling" by Nils Flakstad and Leif Ongstad which whilst old is still very good. HTML Postscript
    Notes:
  1. The postscript files are all set for A4 paper. If you want to print them on different paper, that's your problem. To print them on a postscript printer, you should be able to just copy them to the printer (that's lpr northern.ps on a real operating system :)). For a non-postscript capable printer, you'll have to use ghostscript.
  2. The Corsican HTML guide is fairly old now. I'll try and sort it out before too long. The postscript version is up to date though so if you are going out there I reccommend you try and print out the ps version.
  3. You might want to run the postscript output though a photocopier to get doublesided output as I havn't fixed that bit yet. It is possible to convert the A4 postscript to 2up booklet sheets using the psutils tools of Angus Duggan but you still need to find a way to print both sides of the paper.

The Gallery

A small collection of photos taken during the trips that went to make up the guides. Including a special shot showing how not to do the shuttle! Also some loops in a duo and a few falls in Corsica. Hopefully these will whet your appetite.

A few other collected notes.

I'm not going to try and fix a big collection of links. You can go to Yahoo or a University Canoe club page for those (eg: BUCC), but here are one or two bits of river information that I've got hold of.

Some more river information can be found at other pages on the Web. Some stuff on Spain is on the Warwick University canoe club page and there is some information about rivers in England, North Wales and Scotland on Nige's Kayaking Page. There are no doubt lots of other pages with river information on sites in the US too. Try Yahoo's Whitwater section for more pages, but mind out - lots of them are Sea Kayaking.

This page is maintained by Pat Thoyts. You can find out about me on my contact page.

Last modified: Tue Jun 2 01:11:32 BST 1998 1