Two hundred years ago, it helped spread people, ideas and goods across the US. Now, it's become a paddler's paradise with more than 700 miles of continuous, navigable waterways.

Inside Lock 11 on the Erie Canal in Amsterdam, New York, the metal-on-metal grinding of gears signalled the closing of the gate behind us. With our teal kayaks lined up along the walls of the lock – an aquatic "lift" that raises or lowers boats on sections of the canal where water levels are unequal – we looked like a befuddled shiver of sharks. "Is it too late to go back?" the paddler behind me whispered, hands gripping the rope hanging along the wall beside her, as the water began to drain.

Ten women and men had come out on a sunny June morning to take part in On the Canals, a state-funded recreational programme along the Erie: the US' most important manmade waterway, which celebrates its bicentennial on 26 October 2025.

A voice at the front of the group sang out the opening of the popular American folk tune: "Low bridge, everybody down" / "I've got a mule, and her name is Sal."

"Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal!" we shouted back.

The front gates opened, and we dug in against the current spilling over Amsterdam's massive movable dam. I pulled up alongside the nervous kayaker. "What did you think?" I asked.

Above the sound of rushing water, she shouted, "I think that was the coolest thing I've ever done."

For decades after it opened in 1825, upstate New York's 363-mile Erie Canal, which links the city of Buffalo, on Lake Erie in the west, to the state's capital, Albany, on the Hudson River in the east, was an engineering marvel unrivalled in North America. By connecting the Great Lakes in the Midwest to New York City, the manmade waterway precipitated the mass movement of goods, ideas and people across the country. It not only transformed New York City (which recently celebrated its 400th anniversary) into the US' main seaport and an industrial juggernaut, but it also opened up the interior of the young country to settlement.

The building of the canal marked the first large-scale, government-backed civil engineering project in US history and it was in constant commercial use into the 20th Century. As Brad Utter, senior historian and curator at Albany's New York State Museum and author of the book Enterprising Waters: New York's Erie Canal proclaimed, "If [it was] not the most important manmade development of the 19th Century, this one set the stage."

Utter compares the Erie Canal's historical influence to the internet today. "Prior to the Erie, if you were in Rochester and wanted something from New York City, you'd be looking at a month, maybe two, to get it," he said. "Once the canal opened, you could get it in a week, maybe two. It was, and still is, all about getting things faster, going places faster, shrinking time and space."

Railroads eventually supplanted most of the shipping along the waterway, which was designated the Erie Canalway Heritage Corridor in 2000. As it celebrates its 200th anniversary, the canal is experiencing a renaissance as a paddler's paradise. It connects directly with three north-south-running historic canals – the Champlain, Oswego and Cayuga-Seneca – plus the Hudson River, creating a more than 700-mile continuous, navigable waterway.

In 2021, the New York Power Authority/Canal Corporation, which owns and operates the Erie, launched On the Canals as a series of free excursions for state residents. Most included a combination of cycling along the newly completed Empire State Trail and paddling,........

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