Side RoadsANYONE CAN HANDLE THIS FLOAT The entire 149-mile section of Montana's National Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River, from Fort Benton to James Kipp Recreation Area, is designated a "Class I" float. Steamboats sometimes ran aground at the "rapids" listed on Bureau of Land Management maps -- but these rapids are mere riffles for canoeists. GETTING THERE. Fort Benton is on US Highway 87 in north central Montana. The closest airport is in Great Falls, about 42 miles away. The closest Amtrak station is in Havre, 70 miles. TRIP SEASONS AND LENGTHS. You can float the Upper Missouri from May through September. Summer weekends are most popular; yet, even though our trip was a few days after July 4th, river traffic was sparse. Most people plan trips from one to seven days. Only five places offer easy automobile access for putting in and taking out: Fort Benton (river mile 0); Loma Bridge (rm 21); Coal Banks Landing at Virgelle (rm 41); Judith Landing (rm 88); James Kipp Recreation Area at Fred Robinson Bridge (rm 149). The Bureau of Land Management says average mid-summer current is 3 mph; most floaters cover 22 miles a day. The current was 5-7 mph during our float. Our three-day, two-night trip was along the most scenic stretch -- Coal Banks Landing to Judith Landing -- but we wish we'd planned a longer trip. TRIP OPTIONS. We rented canoes but packed our own food and camping gear. You can also rent outfitted canoes -- with food and gear but no guide -- or take fully guided, outfitted trips by canoe, replica voyageur canoe or river boat. Average costs for canoe rental is $35-$45 a day plus shuttle service of $150 to $500 per group, depending on trip length. Fully outfitted, unguided canoe trips are $150 per person per day; fully outfitted, guided trips are $110 to $300 per person per day. For canoe rentals; unguided, outfitted canoes; and fully guided, outfitted canoes, contact: Missouri River Canoe Company & Virgelle Mercantile, HC 67, Box 50, Loma, Montana 59460; phone 800-426-2926. The Web site is www.canoemontana.com. They also offer memorable bed-and-breakfast rooms -- $80 to $120 -- above an antique store and lodging in restored homesteader cabins and a sheepherder wagon ($30 night/ages 13 and up; $10 night/ages 12 and under). For canoe rentals and outfitted, guided trips by canoe or riverboat, contact Missouri River Outfitters, PO Box 762, Fort Benton, Montana 59442; (406) 622-3295; http://mroutfitters.com. For guided, outfitted trips aboard replica voyageur
canoes, contact River Odysseys West, PO Box 579, Coeur
d'Alene, ID 83816; phone 800-451-6034;
http://www.rowinc.com/ MORE INFORMATION: The Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
offers free information on river hazards, river highlights
and 15 outfitters with BLM permits to provide rentals,
shuttle service or guided trips. The BLM sells an excellent
set of river maps ($8) and a 231-page book, "Montana's Wild
& Scenic Upper Missouri River" ($16.95). Bureau of Land
Management, Lewiston Field Office, 80 Airport Road, PO Box
1160, Lewistown, Montana 59457; phone 406-538-7461;
http://www.mt.blm.gov/ Three great Lewis and Clark books are Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E. Ambrose; Traveling the Lewis & Clark Trail, by Julie Fanselow; Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns -- also available on audiocassette. |
Encountering Lewis and Clark:
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The Upper Missouri and its sandstone-and-iron pedestals and caps. |
"No wonder they call this the Big Muddy," said my husband, Steve, pointing to bits of bark, cottonwood fuzz, feathers, leaves and silt in the milky-brown current.
I patted a five-gallon water jug, reassuring myself that unlike Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who first explored this isolated stretch in 1805, we wouldn't have to drink river water. We were floating Montana's National Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River. It's the single best way to experience places the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery described in their journals. Dams now corral most of the mighty Missouri, but this 149-mile protected portion remains natural, free-flowing.
Cattle lowed from sagebrush banks. Josh, 14, mooed back. Yellow warblers and July sunshine worked their lazy magic on my tight muscles.
As a cautious person -- overly so, my family claims -- I'd prepared proportionately as much for our three-day trip as Lewis and Clark had for their entire expedition. Dark clouds chased us across Montana plains while we listened to taped accounts from expedition journals. We spent our last pre-river night in tiny Virgelle, where the Missouri River Canoe Company offers lodging and rental canoes.
Jimmy Griffin led us to our 1914 homesteader's cabin -- with real beds, woodstove, lantern and privy. I quizzed him about hazards Lewis and Clark mentioned.
Hail big as apples? "We had some canoeists cut and bruised by huge hail during a tornado, but that was seven years ago," he said.
Rattlesnakes? "I've seen lots but never been bit. Make noise and move slowly when you climb up bluffs or near homesteads," Griffin advised.
"How about capsizing? Should we wear lifejackets?" I asked.
He said that less than one-tenth of one percent of canoeists tip.
I didn't think to ask about quicksand or acrophobia, which is why I felt so peaceful when we lunched along Little Sandy Creek, then hiked through fruiting prickly pear cactus and sweet-smelling sagebrush to a bluff Griffin had mentioned. We found four tipi rings, circles of stones that Blackfeet Indians once used to secure buffalo hide tipi covers.
Back on the water, Steve said, "This morning I wanted to stay close to the bank in case we ran into problems. Then I realized: shoot, there are no snags; you hardly have to paddle; you can float sideways down this river."
Ninety-degree heat drove us to guzzle a quart of water each. We dunked our hats in the lukewarm river; it left gritty trails down our necks.
"How did Lewis and Clark manage without sunglasses?" I asked.
By mid-afternoon, sandstone coulees (dry gulches) and hoodoos (toadstool rocks) marked our entrance into the White Cliffs, a twenty-mile-long rock formation that Lewis rhapsodized about on May 31, 1805.
We wouldn't see the "most romantic....seens of visionary inchantment" till the next day, because the explorers arrived from the opposite direction. They muscled upstream -- toward the Missouri's headwaters -- against the swift current that carried us downstream.
The Corps camped that night at Eagle Creek. We set up our tents on the other side of Eagle Creek, as did campers from a guided riverboat tour and a private funyak-and-raft flotilla. The long meadow had vault toilets and fire rings.
We ate corn-orzo-ham soup and fresh bannock, then hiked deep into cool, dark Neats Coulee, where rock pigeons echoed in the 100-foot-tall canyon.
"I would say those rock pigeons are mournfully warbling, definitely not cooing," Abe said.
We saw deer hoofprints in mud, grass flattened by recent rain.
"Wouldn't you love to see a flash flood here?" Josh asked.
"Actually, no," I thought, as Steve and the boys charged 60 feet up a slippery, camel-shaped rock. I climbed it, too, but could only nod mutely when Abe said, "Isn't this cool?"
We descended without injury, so I suggested we hurry back to camp for sunset on LaBarge Rock, named for a steamboat captain. Instead we explored a deeper, darker slot canyon, where water ran below and we had to scrabble with our hands and feet on opposite walls.
As I scaled ceiling-high walls, felt a sandstone handhold crumble, passed within ten feet of a porcupine (no quills thrown) and watched Steve sink knee-deep (but easily get out of) quicksand, I kept telling myself: "Adventure means risk. Lewis and Clark accepted that."
The hike made our moonlight campfire seem all the more blissful. Even the cottonwood smoke smelled sweet. A lanky man joined us.
"You're canoeing? Best way to experience this stretch. I've made the trip many times. By the way, I'm Dayton Duncan," he said, putting out his hand.
Dayton Duncan produced the tape we'd listened to, based on the book and PBS documentary he'd done with Ken Burns. As a guardian of Lewis and Clark historical lore, he's second only to Stephen E. Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage.
"Lewis and Clark have been part of my life for 15 years. They're like old friends," Duncan said.
He and his family were traveling with Missouri River Outfitters, the riverboat company that evacuated canoeists from Eagle Creek the previous week, because of 24-hour rain and wind.
"But you'll have beautiful weather tomorrow for the White Cliffs -- prettiest sight you'll ever see," he promised.
Steve and I rose before dawn for a so-so sunrise, chiefly memorable for reaching the top of Lewis and Clark's mosquito scale: "troublesome; very troublesome; very, very troublesome; immensely troublesome and annoying."
But the White Cliffs lived up to their advance press. Despite dramatic historical changes launched by the Corps of Discovery, the landmarks look just as the explorers recorded.
Dark igneous Citadel Rock appears no different than when Clark described it in 1805, Karl Bodmer sketched it in 1833 and steamboat captains steered by it in the 1860s. We climbed through fields of black-eyed Susans; past coulees lined with pines, to Hole-In-the-Wall -- a scary ascent with heart-stopping views. (The height apparently didn't bother a pair of older overweight women in flip-flops.)
Then came miles of formations that Lewis first thought were built by humans, rather than sculpted by wind, rain and volcanic action. Sheer white walls straight as monuments interspersed with parapets, pedestals and pyramids. Long black rows, sometimes 100 feet high, of horizontal rocks stacked like bricks. We made up our own rock names: Abe Lincoln, Pink Panther, space aliens.
"These cliffs are on a grand human scale, like Washington, D.C., not unimaginably big, like the Grand Canyon. You can hike to great views in half an hour," Steve said.
"And the sky is like a panoramic theater. I like seeing storms so far off," Josh said.
Beautiful as the sky, land and river are, the mix proved too harsh for homesteaders who staked claims on these bottomlands in the early 1900s. We passed many abandoned cabins but saw no farms or homes for almost 30 miles. We saw more American white pelicans than people.
Ours were the only canoes at our final campsite, downstream from Slaughter River, where Lewis and Clark happened on a pile of 100 dead buffalo, driven over a precipice by Indians. The Corps spent a miserable rainy night there without benefit of campstoves, Ziplocs, Polartec or Goretex.
Cow patties littered the cottonwood grove where we camped, but we fell asleep hoping a creek and prairie dog town would keep nearby cattle from trampling our tents.
By mid-morning, the herd was staring enviously at us from grove's edge. Abe headed toward trees we dubbed "the facilities" and saw two bull snakes -- not rattlers, but very big; time to move on.
Too soon, the White Cliffs gave way to wide, muddy bottomlands with more trees. We paddled only during Deadman's Rapids, a shallow riffle that was, as Jimmy Griffin had promised, "maybe almost just a little bit excitin'."
Then there it was -- the Judith Landing bridge, our takeout point and a rude reminder that we weren't Lewis and Clark contemporaries after all.
Copyright © 1999 Joan Huyser-Honig. All rights reserved.
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