Having been missed by a prairie tornado, Mike Ranta waits on a small island of the Bow River, Alberta, for the trailing winds to subside. While trying to cook on a small driftwood fire, Ranta became covered in soot from the swirling winds.
Portfolio: The Voyageur
When Mike Ranta paddled across Canada for the third time, photographer David Jackson followed in his own canoe
David Jackson and Mike Ranta first met in 2014, when Ranta was midway through his first cross-Canada canoe journey and Jackson, then twenty-one, was on his first photo assignment for a national magazine. He drove most of the night, slept a few hours in his car, and when the sun came up photographed Ranta and his dog Spitzii in front of the Canadian parliament building.
Later that morning, he treated Ranta to breakfast at Tim Hortons. The canoeist marched into the joint wearing knee-high rubber boots, traditional Métis sash, and birchbark hat, and proceeded to eat his way through a good portion of Jackson’s assignment fee.
Jackson was enthralled.
“Mike is very unorthodox, not dialed in or prim and proper like the adventurers I was spending my time with,” he said. When Ranta later invited Jackson to join him on another transcontinental canoe trip in 2017—it would be Ranta’s third in six years—he canceled everything to say yes. The project appealed to his immersive
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