Floating the Mighty Free and Easy

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Floating the Mighty Free and Easy
A Flotilla of Stouthearted Men and Women Confronts Hissing Snakes, Weird Rocks, Flat Water, and the Greatest Mud in the West; or, What I did on My Summer Vacation
By Tim Cahill


	Lewis and Clark wuz here: the soft sand cliffs and pyramids along the Missouri Breaks

MUD ON THE BANKS of the Missouri River will suck you down to midcalf, pull the boots or sandals off your feet, cling tenaciously to your skin, clothes, canoe, ice chest, and every last thing you own, and then accompany you home and distribute itself around your living quarters and deposit a ring around your tub that seems to wash off and then magically reappears for about a week or seven. The enduring and insistent mire is locally called "gumbo" and is sometimes described as "greasy." After a heavy rain, the mud extends out miles from the banks of the river. Most of the roads to and from the Wild and Scenic section of the Upper Missouri—which, to confuse matters, is located in Montana—are gravel or dirt, and it's simple to drop your car axle-deep into the gumbo mud, a situation that can be life-threatening along the Missouri at its most Wild and Scenic, an area that is not within walking distance of anywhere. I know; it's happened to me.

When I first moved to Montana, I promised myself that I'd float the Missouri right away. I didn't make it that year, or the year after. Suddenly, or so it seemed, a couple of decades had elapsed and their weight began to smother my ambition and erode my conviction that floating the Missouri was something I really needed to do. But whenever I next checked the Life List, there it was, "Missouri River Float," undone and staring me in the face like an accusation. Smothered ambitions and eroded convictions had combined to form a river dream; a greasy dream, but a dream nonetheless. This year, at last, I decided I had to float the Missouri and I had to float it now.

And so I was on my way to Fort Benton, Montana, the put-in point for the 149-mile-long Wild and Scenic section of what, in any fair and decent world, would be considered the longest river on the planet. The Missouri rises at Three Forks, Montana, at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers, flows vaguely north, and then turns east through Montana to North Dakota before dropping south through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri, finally joining the Mississippi at St. Louis. That's 2,546 miles: longer than the upper and lower Mississippi put together.

If the Mississippi is to be considered a continuation of the Missouri—as I'm arguing it should be—the river is 4,220 miles long: longer than the Nile (4,160 miles), the Amazon (4,000), and the Yangtze (3,434). It's a great big huge world-beater of a river, a ribbon of history and geology and wildlife. Along the free-flowing Wild and Scenic stretchof the Missouri, mule deer and bighorn sheep frolic all over the adjacent geology, mourning doves mourn unseen in the occasional cottonwood, and rattlesnakes hiss from the banks. There are 13 Lewis and Clark campsites, some of them set amid cliffs that look like toadstools or ancient Greek temples or castles in Spain or defunct comedians; there are dinosaurs, buried in the mud; there is a violent and often grimly amusing history; and there is, of course, the matter of my own greasy river dreams.

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