Kayaker Devin Brown to challenge the mighty Mississippi

Devon Brown Photo by Sarah Whiting by& Tony Kiene, Minnesota Spokesman Recorder Sometime this Memorial Day weekend, Northside resident Devin Brown will begin her journey from the headwaters at Lake Itasca to Mile Marker Zero in the Mississippi River Delta, near the point where the “Misi-ziibi” (meaning great river), as the Ojibwe people called it, meets the Gulf of Mexico. Brown is poised to make history by becoming the first Black woman to solo kayak the entire length of the Mississippi River—2,340 miles—and she seeks to do it in record time for a female solo kayaker, a mark currently held by Traci Lynn Martin at 55 days. And just like the river she is setting out to conquer, Brown’s path to this moment has been long and winding. A native of Glenridge, New Jersey, Brown first fell in love with the natural world as a youth attending the Frost Valley YMCA summer camp in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. “We did a lot of hiking and backpacking back then. And we splashed around in the lake a little bit. There was some kayaking,” Brown reminisces. Yet it would still be a few years before Brown discovered her true...