The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
This nonfiction adventure had me from the very first chapter. The Twenty-Ninth Day is an insane retelling of a 600-mile canoe trip in the Canadian tundra that brought the author face-to-teeth with a grizzly bear. What could be more perfect than a canoeing expedition through gorgeous and generally untouched wilderness with five of your buddies? To Alex Messenger- probably nothing. He brings you right along side him: paddling the Dubawnt River, catching trout in Princess Mary Lake, laughing in camp along the shores of an unnamed island, and then climbing a ridgeline of the tundra to look into the eyes of one of the most powerful beasts in North America. In short, this book is intense. I held my breath through each set of rapids, felt the itch to start planning my next camping trip, and was mind blown over how unreal it is that the author walked away from a grizzly attack. This truly is an incredible story, and it has me torn between buying myself a canoe or carrying a rifle to check my mailbox.
— KatieA 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.
The Twenty-Ninth Day is a coming-of-age story like no other, filled with inspiring subarctic landscapes, thrilling riverine paddling, and a trial by fire of the human spirit.