One adventurous Tarkingtonian is paddling home

Ellen Falterman, a 2013 Tarkington High grad, is today approaching the final leg of a very long trip home from Minnesota — by canoe.

Starting out from Lake Itasca, some 220-plus miles upstream from Minneapolis, Falterman has paddled down the length of the Mississippi to New Orleans, then out into the Gulf of Mexico and over to Galveston, where she arrived on Thursday evening.

Today, Falterman started out again, making for Anahuac and the Trinity, with plans to paddle upstream as far as the Hwy. 105 bridge between Tarkington and Moss Hill.

The 25-year-old Falterman is doing all of this paddling, in a 45-year-old Grumman canoe, christened Edna, in memory of her late older brother’s adventurous spirit.

Readers might remember a plane crashed into the Trinity River just south of the Hwy. 105 bridge in September 2016. It was a single-engine Citabria, piloted by Patrick Falterman, who was flying with his friend Zach Esters, when something went wrong, and the plane crashed crashed into the water nose down. Patrick Falterman was 26 and Esters 25.

Before this, Ellen Falterman had already canoed the entire length of of the Missouri River.

In 2012, just before her senior year at Tarkington High School, Ellen Falterman earned her pilot’s license. She told the Houston Chronicle then that she planned to become a certified flight instructor, and according to her facebook account, that is just what she did.

She has set up a facebook page for anyone interested in following along with her adventures. It’s called Ellen Magellan Expeditions.

James LaCombe of the Galveston Daily News posted a fine article about Falterman we recommend reading.

Stay tuned. The Vindicator hopes to catch sight of Falterman as she paddles by Liberty and when she arrives at her destination.