About Overland Canoe

[Note:  This site is a work in progress.  Suggestions and inquiries are welcome.]

Bryce Cordes is the director and expedition leader of Overland Canoe – a moniker that is a catch-all for the lengthy adventurous journeys he has made by canoe, pack-burro and backpack through North America. Among his major undertakings he has canoed across the U.S. from Pacific to Atlantic, hiked with pack-burros from Sacramento, California, to Calgary, Alberta, canoed across Canada from Calgary to Quebec, and canoed the Yukon River from its source to the Bering Sea.   This site is an introduction to his adventures.

About Bryce Cordes

Born in Chicago, raised in Tujunga, a community in the northern foothills of Los Angeles, and currently living in Placerville in the rural Sierra foothills of northern California, Bryce is a naturalist and an adventurer at heart.  As a science teacher, he has positively impacted many young students with his passion for nature and his narratives of wilderness travels.

As a youth Bryce recalls “Growing up in Tujunga there were only two houses between my home and the endless wild of the San Gabriel mountains, so I spent every opportunity I had hiking and exploring those mountains.  My experiences as a youngster on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan, as a boy scout, and my time in the mountains of Tujunga had large influences on me.  From my father, a chemical engineer, I learned the discipline of hard science and my mother, a teacher and animal lover, instilled in me a compassion for all life and a deep appreciation of the natural world.”

A Vietnam veteran, Bryce subsequently earned an A.A. degree from Glendale Community College in southern California, a B.A. in Biology and teaching credential from CSU Sacramento, and an M.S. in Geosciences from Mississippi State University.  As a career science teacher he has primarily taught biology and natural history at the high school level, but he has also enlightened young minds in chemistry, physics, physical science, geology, meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy along the way.