The Twenty-Nineth Day
April 14, 2025
A six-hundred-mile canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness is a seventeen-year-old's dream adventure, but after he is mauled by a grizzly bear, it's all about staying alive.
This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts seventeen-year-old Alex Messenger's near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra. The story follows Alex and his five companions as they paddle north through harrowing rapids and stunning terrain. Twenty-nine days into the trip, while out hiking alone, Alex is attacked by a barren-ground grizzly. Left for dead, he wakes to find that his summer adventure has become a struggle to stay alive. Over the next hours and days, Alex and his companions tend his wounds and use their resilience, ingenuity, and dogged perseverance to reach help at a remote village a thousand miles north of the US-Canadian border.
This book was disappointing. I didn’t find the story leading up to the bear attack very engaging. Once he was attacked it felt pretty minor since they continued on with their journey and there wasn’t much of a rescue effort.