In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 mls on the tremendous river in Canada that now bears his name, searching for the fabled Northwest Passing that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie’s route by canoe inside a grueling journey — and uncovered the Passage he could not find.

Disappointment River is definitely a dual traditional narrative and travel memoir that simultaneously transports readers back to the heroic age group of North American about Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage exploration and areas them in a still durable but increasingly delicate Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration with the dual causes of globalization and climate modification. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to mix the continent of THE UNITED STATES with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches from the East. What he discovered was a river that he called ‘Disappointment.’ Mackenzie passed away thinking he previously failed. He was incorrect.

In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie’s epic voyages in stunning prose, he individually retraces his moves, battling exhaustion, publicity, mosquitoes, white drinking water rapids and the risk of bears. He transports readers to a world seldom glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote control indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Sea that could turn into a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.