Chicagoans on the South Side may have seen an odd sight earlier this month — a man in homemade clothes and a pirate hat walking along Archer Avenue with a canoe in tow as he traveled between the Des Plaines River and Lake Michigan.
For Peter Frank, it was just another leg on an ambitious journey that has spanned more than 450 days as he attempts to complete the 6,000-mile “Great Loop” across several states, the Great Lakes and along the East Coast and back.
And he is doing it backwards, or upstream — the same route French explorers Louis Joliet (who the Chicago suburb is named after) and Jacques Marquette took in the late 1600s.
Frank, who has chronicled his journey online and has more than 75,000 followers, has attracted a legion of followers — and admirers.
“People who do things like this bring everyone together,” said Matt Baranko, who met Frank in Lake Michigan near his home in Lake Forest and paddled along side him for a couple miles. “All the comments online are all positive, good things,” Baranko said. “He’s bringing good news to the world.”
A Michigan launch
Frank, who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, has just over 250 miles to go to complete his journey. He was in southern Wisconsin over the weekend after heading up the shores of Lake Michigan. The 24-year-old expects to finish his journey within the next month.
Frank is equipped with GPS, flares, VHF radio, a bright headlamp for paddling at night and several batteries for his cell phone that allow him to call his mother almost every day.
After starting in his hometown of Escanaba, Frank traveled north on Lake Michigan to Lake Huron, Lake Ontario and eastward on water and some land portages where he pulled his canoe on a set of wheels he travels with, reaching the Atlantic Ocean through the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
He then paddled both in the open and the intercoastal waterways around the southern tip of Florida, up through the Gulf of Mexico and once he got to Mobile, Alabama, headed north on inland rivers and land portages until he got to the Ohio River near Paducah, Kentucky.
He reached the Mississippi and got to Cairo, Illinois, but after paddling 7 miles upstream, the water became unnavigable and he had to be driven to the Illinois River. Frank said it was the only part of his journey that he wasn’t able to complete upstream.
Along the way, Frank said he has faced several issues after basically being outside “24/7 for 15 straight months.”‘
“The majority of it has been nothing but bad weather,” Frank said. “I crossed one of the largest bodies of water in the world, Lake Ontario. It took four days, and even light winds on that lake are terrifying.”
Backdraft from a hurricane swept up to Canada when he was in Ontario, forcing him to remain stuck on an archipelago for five days because of 30 mph winds.
When he got near Florida, temps were well over 100 degrees.
In Illinois, the Des Plaines River was at its lowest level in 20 years and nearly half of the 19-mile stretch was rapids.
While going up the Illinois River, he said he counted more than 240 Asian carp that jumped over his boat.
“Six hit me directly and it felt like a 15-pound baseball pelting me in the ribs,” Frank said. He had to take a two-week break because of the bruising that resulted.
When he arrived in the outskirts of Chicago, he was forced to portage his canoe after coming up the Des Plaines River when he got to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal because it is electrified to keep invasive Asian Carp out of Lake Michigan.
Frank was met in Chicago by Kennith Johnson, who helped Frank pull his canoe for 21 miles over land for two days until he reached Lake Michigan. Before that, Frank was able to meet some Chicagoans and got to enjoy some Chicago staples.
“I liked Chicago and didn’t think I would,” Frank said last week in a phone interview from his cell phone while paddling along Lake Michigan near Lake Forest. “We went to a hole in the wall pizza place that was pretty great.”
He said he also hit a “couple of burger joints” and even went to a “fancy restaurant” and had French onion soup.
“I definitely splurged a little bit and enjoyed all the debauchery that came with the Windy City.”
Frank said he has a large supply of dehydrated food with him and often is brought food by people who have followed his journey online. And while he usually camps when he needs sleep, many people have given him places to stay when he needs to rest.
While weather and food may be daunting challenges, the difficulty of going upstream is impressive, says another accomplished kayaker.
“That’s some work,” said North Center resident Andrea Knepper, who herself kayaked the length of the U.S. Pacific Coast, 1,500 miles in three months, in 2019.
“Most kayaks and canoes travel about 3 knots, which is about 3 miles an hour,” Knepper said. “If the current is 3 knots and you’re going with it, you’re traveling 6 knots an hour. If you’re going against it and you’re going 3 knots, you’re thread-milling,” Knepper said.
“It’s much, much harder to do it backwards,” she said.
Frank, an Eagle Scout who was home-schooled, said his reason for completing this journey isn’t for fame or charity, but for a more personal reason.
“I just just want to live,” he said.
At 14, he was run over by a car, and shattered his spine.
“Doctors didn’t think I’d be able to walk again,” he said.
After recovering from that, in 2019 Frank rode a unicycle across America to bring awareness to Beacon House, an organization that helped him heal.
He has also backpacked and hitchhiked across Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah; canoed the entire 2,400 miles of the Mississippi River; completed an 11-month expedition bike-packing trip 700 miles through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida; and circumnavigated the 1,515 mile water trail of Florida by canoe.
While the current journey isn’t for a specific cause, he does hope people will be inspired by him.
“I hope people are able to apply what I’m doing to other parts of their lives and be able to do things for themselves,” he said.