Peter’s is a journey undertaken for personal accomplishment and adventure. He’s been on the trip for more than 15 months, having departed from Escanaba in June 2024.

The Great Loop is a challenge often attempted by sailors and powerboaters; this summer, multiple vessels made port in Escanaba as just one stop along the route that tends to take months. There are a few different varieties on routes that can be taken, but the loop includes the Great Lakes, the Atlantic Ocean, and numerous rivers. Most boaters do it counter-clockwise.

The journey shouldered by Peter — the 24-year-old son of Ellen and Butch Frank of southeast Escanaba — is unique. He’s doing the loop in a one-man boat — a Sawyer Loon, a decked canoe with kayak-like characteristics — with a single paddle, and he’s doing it the opposite way ’round: east through the Straits of Mackinac and Canada, down the eastern seaboard, and then upriver after crossing through Florida. It’s believed that this upstream, clockwise feat hasn’t been accomplished in a canoe since the designer of Peter’s canoe, Verlen Kruger, completed it for the first time alongside his son 45 years ago.

While Peter’s journey on this trip physically began last June, it could be said that one impactful moment that contributed to leading to this path was a nasty accident 10 years ago. In October 2015, then-14-year-old Peter was struck by a car and broke multiple bones. At first, it wasn’t certain he would even survive, let alone go on to relearn to walk, unicycle and more.

A young athlete and Peter Frank fan hands the canoeist a ball to sign after her mother rushed her out to meet Frank in Illinois. Frank was in Illinois as part of his journey to complete the Great Loop. (Photo courtesy of Kennith Johnson)

As he recalls, he was hospitalized for about a month, had a wheelchair for about six weeks, used a walker for six months, and was in rehabilitation therapy for about a year and a half.

“That really changed a lot of things in my life. I got put on a lot of restrictions. A lot of my childhood was robbed from me because of that,” Peter said.

But there were things to be grateful for as he recovered — Beacon House in Marquette gave Ellen and Butch a place to stay while they kept near their son’s hospital bedside. And afterwards, Peter found ways to reclaim that which he was passionate about.

One thing he was afraid of was whether he would be able to ride a unicycle again — a hobby his big brother, Breck, had taught him when Peter was 11.

“You have a lot of these things that are threatened to leave you forever, like the unicycling and the hobbies and the sports, and you’re told that, well, you went through something that you had no control of, so now you continue to lose control by losing the things that you love,” Peter said of the post-accident frustration he overcame.

Peter Frank works on making a new pair of pants. (Photo courtesy of Kennith Johnson)

Though he managed to get back on a unicycle around age 16, continued with Boy Scouts to become an Eagle Scout in 2019, and has since picked up canoeing, Peter continues to live with some restrictions.

With three titanium rods in his body, being more susceptible to certain further injuries, and limitations on the amount weight he could carry and the amount of time he could spend on his feet, “there’s a lot of boundaries I couldn’t cross … that made me feel very isolated, trying to be an adult,” Peter said.

There are certain jobs he can’t perform, but he has held and enjoyed a handful. He cited working at the Delta County dump as an enjoyable experience because of the interesting people he met there.

However, planning out a career didn’t feel right to Peter.

“I think it’s important to go out and work and have a job. It’s also important to stay true to your values and do something that you enjoy, or work towards doing something that you enjoy,” Peter said.

This screenshot from whereispaterfrank.com on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, shows how far an Escanaba man has traveled by canoe on the Great Loop since departing Escanaba on June 27, 2024.

He mentioned that a lot of people get stuck in jobs they aren’t happy with, and while there’s nothing wrong with doing the same job every day, many people end up jaded and bitter.

People can end up in those circumstances because “they didn’t put their own spirit and their selves first, or they didn’t have the choice to because of ulterior responsibilities, which is also a very unfortunate thing,” Peter said. “Of course, I say this from a point of privilege — that, you know, I had the kind of vision to see what I really wanted and put in the steps to work for that.”

The current Great Loop endeavor is just the latest in a handful of journeys Peter has gone on. In 2021, he took a 3 1/2-month unicycle expedition from Appleton, Wis., to Phoenix, Ariz. — a trip that raised awareness and more than $30,000 for Beacon House, the organization that supported the Franks after the car accident.

After Peter’s rest in Phoenix, a 10-day backpacking and hitchhiking adventure to the West Coast followed. He caught a flight back to Wisconsin.

The next year — from June to November of 2022 — Peter took on the challenge of paddling the Mississippi River from the headwaters at Lake Itaska in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. After completing the route, he sold his canoe and a week later set off on a mountain bike for another multi-state adventure that lasted 65 days. By the end, he had found a vintage Sawyer Loon canoe for sale.

Peter Frank stands by his canoe in Annapolis, Md., on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, a day before he planned to resume his trip along the Great Loop in what is roughly a 6,000-mile voyage and that he estimates will take him a total of about 17 months. (AP Photo/Brian Witte)

Peter spent four months in 2023 circumnavigating Florida, which included a lot of canoe-paddling, a few days stranded on an island, and a couple spells of rest with generous hosts.

Throughout Peter’s trips, he’s encountered several helpful souls. The banks of the Mississippi are known for “river angels,” people who live along the mighty river and offer assistance to travelers taking on the challenge of paddling its length. Similarly, Peter has met friends around the country — either by chance or because they’ve heard of his journey and sought him out to offer food, lodging, company and more.

When passing though Delaware on the Great Loop journey, he visited a library to use a sewing machine.

A recognizable characteristic of Peter’s — besides the sticker-clad Loon sometimes under sail and flying an America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association burgee — is his style. A few years ago, he wore a lot of thrifted clothes, but more lately he’s made his own, searching throughout history for different fashions. He said he feels free and comfortable in handmade clothes instead of “a walking billboard for random brands.” The tricorne pirate hat he crafted out deerskin for a bit of whimsy became almost like his own trademark.

One of the hardest things about the Great Loop is adhering to a timeline that puts the traveler at certain route points at certain times of year. With weather being impossible to predict a year in advance and uncontrollable, Peter found himself delayed a couple times over the past 15 months, but always waited out the weather until he could continue. It wasn’t until reaching the Mississippi River on his journey north (upstream) that he was forced to make the extremely difficult but necessary decision to put part of his journey on hold.

A detail of Peter Frank's canoe is shown Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Annapolis, Md. (AP Photo/Brian Witte)

Before hitting that point, Peter had paddled the last 45-mile stretch of the Ohio River in one 12-hour day in August. He arrived at the Mississippi-Ohio River confluence to find it churning ferociously as he waded through mud to camp.

During the next three days, Peter paddled up the dangerous river, carefully navigating around jetties and eddies and rocks. After three days of struggling, he had made it seven miles up the river.

After 20, 30 and 40-mile days, this section of the loop was denying Peter safe passage. The conditions were such that his life was at risk, and continuing at such a pace wasn’t feasible. He still needed to make it back up Lake Michigan before gale season.

After an intense vision and an emotional hour that led to Peter deciding to return to complete that portion at a later date, he described a possible strategy for proceeding up the Mississippi River.

“There’s a way to do it, and it requires extensive planning, a little bit of seasonal luck, and requires a lot of knowledge. And I put a lot of time and research into understanding that, and I knew — and I even told people in podcasts before — that if there was a part of this journey that was going to stop me, it would be the Mississippi,” Peter said. “And so I was half expecting for that to happen … and it was a very emotional moment for me, because I actually made seven miles of progress up the Mississippi before I got to a point where I couldn’t — and that was the point where I had to call it. Because if I did happen to flip the canoe right there, it would be instant death.”

He waved a “see you later” to that river, intending to devote attention to it some months in the future, and continued onto the next leg of the Great Loop.

Kennith Johnson of central Illinois first learned of Peter’s Great Loop journey back in the spring when a post came across his social media feed. A couple months later, Johnson saw on the live tracker on Peter’s website that the canoeist was going to be coming up the Illinois River not far from him.

Johnson, a photographer, brought his camera to shoot some images as Peter paddled. As it turned out, Peter came ashore near Browning, Ill., and chatted with a few people. It was there that he and Johnson first met.

Johnson met up with Peter again a couple more times. When it came time for Peter to portage his canoe through the city of Chicago, Johnson and another Illinoisan, Ben Sparks, trekked alongside him.

“It was long,” Johnson said of that walk through Chicago. “It was a lot of fun, actually. Weather was fine; people were friendly; people were honking and cheering him on. And a couple people that had been following him came and seen him and brought us all Gatorade.”

Now able to call Peter a friend, Johnson, who himself has been thinking about kayaking the Mississippi, was impressed with the young Great Looper from Escanaba.

“You can really hear, like, the drive in his voice and, like. the passion he has for he’s doing,” Johnson said. “It definitely takes a different type of person to push yourself to do something that intense.”

Though his adventures have allowed him countless and invaluable experiences, plus interactions with interesting characters, Peter noted there are downsides. Traveling solo for long periods, the relationships he’s able to have are unusual, and he goes very long spells without seeing his family. But they and many others will gladly and proudly welcome him back home soon.

“Our community should be super proud of and inspired by this great young man from our little town of Escanaba,” resident Debbie Motto said. “I can’t imagine how astronomically difficult this journey must have been: to spend over a year through freezing cold and extremely hot weather, sleeping in a tent when not paddling his canoe against the current tackling the Great Loop BACKWARDS … this after being hit by run over by a car at 14, being told he’d never walk again and with rods in his back and leg! Peter Frank will be the hero of our little town, an inspiration to many who hear his story… What life throws at us can be overcome.”

Now in the home stretch, Peter is halfway up Lake Michigan and bound for the start-and-end point of Escanaba. As of Friday evening, he was near Sheboygan, Wis.

A “welcome home” party for Peter has been set for 2 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, at the Escanaba Country Club. He hopes to make it home a few days beforehand, and his family and friends and fans at home plan to greet him at the beach when he does.

Updates can be found on the “Peter’s Voyage” Facebook group, and the live tracker is on whereispeterfrank.com.

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R. R. Branstrom can be reached at 906-786-2021 or rbranstrom@dailypress.net.

From left to right, Kennith Johnson, Ben Sparks and Peter Frank portage the canoe Frank has used to traverse the Great Loop though Chicago. (Photo courtesy of Kennith Johnson)

This map from the website of the America's Great Loop Cruisers' Association shows variations on routes.