Events - Event View

This is HASK's annual business meeting and will include a report from all the club officers and election of 2020 club officers.

The HASK Library will be on-site and open for business. Please form a double line to check out materials.

We have a new batch of HASK decals to distribute. 

West Hansen is the first person to lead an expedition to paddle the entire Amazon River from its newly verified longest source. In 2012, West led a National Geographic expedition which ran 500 miles of white water through the Peruvian Andes, beginning at 14,800' elevation down to the cloud forest. Once clear of the mountains, the team took two Valley Sea Kayak Aleut II tandem kayaks and a solo Epic 18x sea kayak the remaining 3800 miles to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil.

West will be reading an excerpt from his new book, "The Amazon From Source to Sea" and talking about his adventures on the Amazon and also on the Volga River in Russia, which he was also the first to kayak from source to sea. He'll provide anecdotes not covered in his book or the documentary, "Peeled Faces on the Amazon" and answer burning questions about how a guy went from a cubicle in a nondescript job to facing down gun barrels in the jungle.

For more information, please visit www.westhansen.com , where you can also order his book and download the documentary.

Here is what a former editor of Canoe and Kayak Magazine says about him:
Fifty-year-old canoe racer-turned-explorer West Hansen is planning to kayak the Amazon River when he learns that everyone - cartographers, adventurers, even his own sponsor, National Geographic Society - has misplaced the source of the world's greatest river. One of exploration's great prizes is suddenly back up for grabs, and to claim it all Hansen has to shepherd a team of irascible Texans and international whitewater stars some 4,200 miles, from the crest of the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. The journey brings him face-to-face with a controversy as old as Livingstone's quest for the source of the Nile, in addition to the usual obstacles. With great humor and insight, Hansen details a wild ride full of personality conflicts, extortion, Machiavellian subterfuge, pirates, drug lords, uncharted whitewater, massive thunderstorms, injuries, illness, fatigue, tropical heat, blizzards, altitude sickness, jungle drunks, bales of marijuana, substandard scotch, bureaucratic labyrinths, loneliness, colossal tides and the unstoppable force of the largest and longest river on the planet.

-- Jeff Moag, Freelance Writer and Editor, former editor of Canoe and Kayak Magazine