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 CAMPED NEAR a place called Steamboat Rock because it looks like a steamboat, though it is likely Scott saw other images. No one asked him. I climbed a dry drainage and found a big-game trail leading up to the summit of a ridge overlooking a hillside that dropped down to the river. The slope was crowded with closely spaced but individual pillars that looked, to me, like the rows upon rows of terra-cotta warriors at Xi'an, in China.

Back at camp, as Scott cooked, Joel and I argued a bit about cows. Very occasionally we saw a few of the animals on a distant hillside. Once we found a dozen standing in the water. Joel is one of those folks who would like to see the federal government deny grazing leases and buy up—or merely confiscate—millions of acres to save the land from the depredations of ranchers. I, on the other hand, live in Montana, know many ranchers, and believe that they are often conscientious stewards of the land.

The BLM manages the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River with the stated purpose of ensuring "that the river will retain its essentially wild and pristine nature." The BLM asks floaters to do their part in supporting this policy, which Joel translated as "destroy all cows."

"Actually," Linnea said, "I floated this stretch 15 years ago, and there were cows everywhere." Now it was a jolt to see just one, even from a distance.

I thought about that while floating the next day. There was no one else on the river at all, and when I blasted out ahead of the others, paddling like a bastard, it was easy to imagine that I was the first person on the river, the first to see this stretch. There is a bridge over the water where the Judith River empties into the Missouri from the south, and a BLM campsite at what is called Judith Landing. It was a weekend, and there was a dirt-bike competition on a track just up from the river. The bikes roared over various jumps in phalanxes of four and five.

"Nice place," I said to Joel, shouting over the howl of dirt machines. "No cows."

About a half-mile downriver we lost the sound of the dirt bikes and set up camp on the grassy banks. There weren't a lot of trees—not as many as one would expect anyway—and that is partially the legacy of steamboats that brought trappers and traders and pioneers up the river for the entire last half of the 19th century. A steamboat burned about 30 cords of wood a day, and in the years between 1860 and 1888 there were 400 steamboats operating on the Missouri in Montana. Wood was purchased from enterprising businessmen called woodhawks, who naturally cut down the most convenient trees available, the cottonwoods on the riverbank. The cottonwoods have not come back in force. They need an occasional flood to propagate properly, and a dam above the Wild and Scenic stretch moderates the yearly deluge.

"And even if a few do get a start, there are always cows to trample them and such," Joel said.

"You see any cows?" I asked.

"They used to be here."

"How do you know?"

"Because there're no cottonwoods."

And so it went, bickering on about cows all the next day, until once again I paddled out far ahead and then drifted down the river in splendid solitude. The white cliffs had given way to successive layers of sand and clay called Claggett Shale, the Judith River Formation, and Bearpaw Shale.

Shales are badlands, those areas of gnarled eroded hills and cliffs unsuitable for ranching or farming. Badlands are seldom inhabited by humans (or cows), which is why they are generally alive with wildlife of almost every description. We saw golden eagles, bald eagles, ospreys, mule deer, antelope, foxes.

At our campsite that night we watched the sun set on some bighorn sheep in the notch of a ridgeline above. I thought it might be possible to climb up on the notch, but Joel said it was not.

Which is why, the next day, David, Bobbie, and I were laboring up a hillside of crumbling black mud: just about
what you'd expect from an old dried- out seabed. Near the top I found myself in trouble. There was no going down— too crumbly—and the last few moves didn't appear to be doable, as Joel had said. What was I doing up here, anyway? Trying to prove something to Joel about cows?

Bobbie and David were already standing on top, just above me, watching my struggles.

"You know," Bobbie said, "if you got your weight out over your feet, you'd be right up here. You climb like a reptile."

True enough, but I managed to find a handhold and lever myself up over the top. It was a fine view all around, especially directly below, where the bighorn sheep were staring up at us with an air of incredulous curiosity. I waved down at the camp, signaling Joel in a gesture that I hoped expressed the oxymoronic concept of bovine nobility.

The last ten miles of the float are in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a million acres of native prairies and forests in the groins of the hills, and otherwise all badlands and river bottom. The mud is about as bad as it gets here, and there was no way to stop for lunch anywhere along any bank without sinking into the greasy muck up to the knee. And there was no way to scrape the mud off legs or sandals without simply spreading it around, distributing it more evenly about the body.

So we were filthy when we took out at the Fred Robinson Bridge on Montana Highway 191. We washed Bobbie's kayaks a number of times, but every time they dried we could still see the same thin skim of Missouri mud on them. Everyone embraced everyone else—spreading more gumbo about—and as I mentally ticked "Missouri River Float" off the Life List, I noticed that it had migrated directly onto the Do Yearly List. Missouri mud does not want to let you go. It clutches at you across time and space. It lives in dreams, in the heart, and in the soul, and I was still washing little bits of it out of my bathtub three days later.

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