Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)

WE FLOATED PAST Citadel Rock, a distinctive crag leaning out over the river and, at a guess, about 200 feet high. The Citadel is an igneous intrusion, which is a pleasantly onomatopoetic way of saying that hot magma rose up into the cracks of the white sandstone cliffs in hard vertical blades called dikes. As the softer sandstone falls away, the dikes remain, towers of odd and idiosyncratic rock.

In 1805, Lewis and Clark took note of this particular rock, and on August 16, 1833, a Swiss artist named Karl Bodmer sketched the most famous depiction of the Citadel. Bodmer was traveling with Prince Maximilian of Wied, a German aristocrat with an interest in indigenous American peoples. He'd hired Bodmer to document the journey. The artist was accurate and evocative. His drawings and watercolors underscore, I think, one of the few failings of the Lewis and Clark expedition: their failure to bring along an artist like Bodmer to record their trip.

Somewhat farther down the river is another igneous intrusion, a relatively thin blade of rock standing at right angles to the course of the river. From upriver we could see—at the summit of that rock—a large roundish hole, though which blue sky was visible. This is Hole in the Wall.

We saw two canoes on the bank, and there were two older gentlemen sitting in lawn chairs and fishing for Missouri River sturgeon where we pulled over to climb up. "Uh, our wives are up there," one of the fishermen said, pointing toward the canyons and gullies that led up to the Hole. He held out a mobile phone. "They said they're stuck."

"Probably not so bad," the other fellow said.

"You might give them a hand on your way up," the first man said in a paroxysm of chivalry.

One of the women was frozen at a tricky downclimb, and her friend wouldn't leave her. Bobbie climbed up to their position, deployed the rope, and sent the women back to their husbands, who were talking about sturgeon on the riverbank far below.

The Hole in the Wall is about 300 feet above the river, standing above a ridge that drops to a sloping grassy hillside. We moved through the grass, wary of snakes. Prairie rattlers, up to six feet long, make their homes along the Missouri. We'd seen no rattlers, but the campsites were full of bull snakes slithering along on their reptilian business. It is a tenant of Montana folk wisdom that when the bull snakes are plentiful, rattlers are scarce. Still, it is disconcerting to nearly step on a seven-foot-long snake. Bulls will hiss, and they can bite, but they aren't venomous and pose no real threat to humans.

As we moved through the grass, Scott hissed, snakelike. Linnea froze with a foot in the air, and we all laughed—ha ha ha—about how funny our best chef was today, and nobody sneaked up from behind to bean him with a rock.

The view was 320 degrees of palaces and turrets and spires. We could hear the wind whistling and booming through the Hole as we crawled up the backside of the formation, past initials and names and dates carved into the rock. None of them said, "Meriwether Lewis 1805."

And then we were back on the river, paddling past piles of columned rocks standing alone on the sage-littered hillsides and looking rather like Greek temples.

"That one," I said, paddling beside Scott, "looks like the Acropolis."

"I see a Buddha," Scott said.

"You're right," I said, staring at the Acropolis. "Spitting image of the Buddha."

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