Anne Sherve-Ose holds a copy of her book, “Mississippi Misadventures.”She’ll hold a book talk tonight at 6:30 p.m. at Kendall Young Library.

“Having canoeing be such a constant part of my life, when my friend called me and asked me if I wanted to paddle the Mississippi, I said of course,” Anne Sherve-Ose said.

Kendall Young Library will be hosting an author visit with Sherve-Ose on Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. She will discuss her adventures paddling the Mississippi River at a book signing in the Kendall Young Public Library meeting room. Copies will be available for $5.

A long-time Hamilton County resident, Sherve-Ose, 64, spent parts of thirteen years paddling the Mississippi River from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. She and her two college friends finally finished paddling the river in 2016. She has written a book, Mississippi Misadventures, which details their experiences in that endeavor.

She first became interested in canoeing in college. She worked at canoeing camps, Canoe Outfitters and Outward Bound.

“I just kept trying different aspects of the Boundary Waters,” she said. “I’ve been going back there for probably 50 years. It’s probably my favorite spot in the whole world.”

She and two friends spent thirteen years paddling the Mississippi from start to finish. She, along with college friends Deb Lenox White and Deb Stephens Knutson, took to the river for a series of adventures and experiences. They blocked out one week a year beginning in 2004 and had what Sherve-Ose calls the ‘thirteen trips of a lifetime.’ The final year of the trip, 2016, took nearly two and a half weeks to finish.

“We would always start the next year where we ended the time before,” said Sherve-Ose.

She estimates she and her comrades spent 100 days navigating the Mississippi. They started at Lake Itasca and finished their journey in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was kind of funny, said Sherve-Ose. “When we started we were just going to go from the headwaters in Itasca to the Twin Cities. That took us four years, or four weeks to do.”

Sherve-Ose was a canoe guide in a former life, and has been a regular visitor to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota for the past fifty years. Paddling the Mississippi was a very different kind of challenge, however.

“We never really planned to do the whole thing but it just kind of morphed into that,” she said. “And then by the time we got to St. Louis, it was ‘well, we might as well finish this. And I’m really glad we did.”

She covered 2,552 miles.

Sherve-Ose taught music at Northeast Hamilton in Blairsburg, St. Thomas Aquinas in Webster City, and Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls. Now retired, she lives on a farm near Williams.

For more information about the event, contact Kendall Young Library Director Ketta Lubberstedt-Arjes at (515) 832-9100 or email kettala@kylib.org.