Those sojourns into the Northern wilderness, where the main mode of transportation is a canoe and paddle, helped cast the die for the career path Blackwell now hopes to travel.
No, he doesn't long to be a guide or outfitter. He's a craftsman and artisan. His preferred medium is the strip cedar canoe, each handcrafted and burnished with one of Blackwell's signature abstract wildlife images depicting a soaring hawk.
His boats are examples of practical artwork. They are as functional as they are aesthetic.
"I started canoeing at an early age, and I'm passionate about the outdoors and nature and the environment and wildlife," Blackwell said. "I've always had an interest in artwork and building, just creating stuff, whether it was sculpture or painting. I never really had any woodworking experience except just to learn as you go. And for me that was the best way to do it."
Blackwell, 28, has had some training. He built his first canoe as part of a college-credit art project while a 16-year-old junior at Manual High School.
"I chose to incorporate the art with the canoe," he said.
He graduated from Manual in 1998 and in 2005 earned a bachelor's degree in natural resources from Brigham Young University.
Blackwell has a trim, muscular physique and enjoys a wide range of interests, most of which hinge on being outside. He's an archery deer hunter and a fisherman, a hiker, a camper and, of course, a canoeist. He served as a missionary to the Marshall Islands in service to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and he's also an Eagle Scout.
Blackwell hasn't embraced the role of starving artist. He's an insurance salesman, which he says he enjoys, but he prefers building cedar canoes one strip at a time.
"The (insurance business) is all right," he said in his cluttered woodworking shop, which included a finished canoe along with nearly completed 16-foot and 14-foot boats. "But I don't know if I want it to be my career path or not. I'm doing (this) because I want this to be my career path."
Blackwell's canoe business is truly a cottage industry. Kaintuck Canoes LLC is headquartered in a converted barn on his parents' property in northeastern Jefferson County. He expanded the building and added an office with a phone and computer. It's a space he usually shares with his 12-year-old black Labrador, Cisco.
By conventional measures business has been slow -- Blackwell only recently sold his first boat. But he's not running a mass-production operation and finds the cookie-cutter retail world a bit worrisome anyway.
"Our society is turning into the most amount for the cheapest amount," he said. "You get what you pay for."
Art rarely is easily made or cheaply purchased. A Blackwell boat -- each piece cut, glued and finished by hand -- starts at around $2,000 and takes about a month to build. He also makes cedar paddles, which sell for $80.
The canoes aren't as fragile or old-school as they appear. They are built from white cedar on a red oak frame, and the seats are stretched leather with rawhide binding. Blackwell usually gets his cedar from Michigan or Maine and cuts and shapes each piece in his shop.
Like other boat builders, he works from a template. Specifics depend on what the customer wants and what the boat will be used for. A canoe designed to run a Class III river, for example, is different in size, shape and design from one to be used for paddling on Taylorsville Lake.
Once the template is set and the frame built, he cuts and glues the strips, which are one-quarter inch thick and about a half-inch wide. The wood varies slightly in grain and color, and he uses those varying shades to create part of the boat's artistic design. No two are the same.
"I apply each strip individually and use Elmer's glue," he said. "School glue, essentially."
He then adds two layers of 6-ounce fiberglass cloth to the exterior and one layer to the inside of the boat, sealing the synthetic with multiple coats of epoxy. The fiberglass dries clear, sealing and strengthening the boat.
The canoes are surprisingly lightweight. I picked up a 14-foot boat that lacked only a seat. It weighed around 45 pounds.
"You've got two layers of fiberglass, a quarter-inch of wood and another layer of fiberglass," Blackwell said. "It's really the best of both worlds. Wood has always been a fantastic building material, and if you can preserve the quality, as fiberglass does, then it's going to last a long time. I think it's a superior product to whatever is on the market."
His boats seem almost too lovely to use, like a finely crafted bamboo fly rod or a hand-tooled long bow. Blackwell bristles at such talk, which he hears frequently.
"That is a huge misconception, that these canoes are too pretty to be on the water," he said. "They're built to be on the water. They're built to last a lifetime. And one of the beauties about wood and fiberglass is that it's repairable."
Blackwell would like to sell more boats, of course, but he also hopes they'll serve as an attention-grabbing vehicle to help prompt people of his generation to get outside. Strip canoes are fairly common in the Northeast but remain a rarity across much of the South. When he has one of his boats on a local creek, river or lake, it always turns heads.
"I don't think that a lot of urban Kentuckians -- mainly Louisville -- I don't think they know what they have," he said. "I love to hunt. I love to fish. I love the outdoors. I see other generations that love to hunt and fish, but they're not really bringing on young people. At least I don't see it. A lot of people I went to (high) school with didn't like to get out and rock climb or hike or canoe or fish. They wanted to play video games.
"But I think part of that -- maybe a lot of it -- was not knowing what was out there. They didn't know that they can put in at Floyds Fork and get out of the city and still stay in the city."
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