Upper Missouri River Trip Report, part 1

Canoing the Upper Missouri River in Central Montana is all at once a relaxing, adventurous, scenic, historic and inexpensive trip that I believe is a must do for anyone who likes to canoe, camp, hike or just get away from people. We've gone 2 years in a row, and it remains one of my favorite destinations. We go with my brother and his wife, which is nice not only because we really really like them, but because we split gas to get over there, and the shuttle fee.

Total cost for this years 5 day trip for us was $297, which included gasoline, canoe rental, camping, shuttle fee and poop bags. It doesn't include food, but I never include that because you gotta eat no matter where you are.

The river is along the Lewis and Clark trail, and remains pretty much how it looked when they came through. It is wilderness, and once you put on the river you need to be prepared because you will have no contact with civilization for a minimum of 3 days.

The river runs at different speeds depending on the time of year, but it is always a class 1, which means it's very kid friendly and safe for just about anyone. Most of the time, we just connected our canoes together, chatted, relaxed and let the current take us on down the river. Due to spring melting, the river is quite a bit higher and muddy in early June when we usually go. There has been talk of going back this fall so we can see the river in it's blue state, but nothing has been finalized yet.

The campsites are primitive(toilet, no showers) but beautiful in every way, and there is much hiking and sightseeing to do right out the back door of your tent.

It is rumored that this is rattlesnake country, but we've yet to see one on either of our trips. We did see a 5 foot long bull snake last year.

We drove from Seattle to Holland Lake, MT the first day. It's a place we used to camp all the time as little kids, so it's a big nostalgia spot for me and my bro. It is an extremely beautiful place(the water is as clear as you'll ever see) but we weren't greeted with very good weather - in fact in rained the entire time we were there.

Quickly set up camp.




Or I should say they did... One good thing about being the group photographer is I can get out of anything by saying " Oh look, something to take a picture of!"

I wandered off and took a couple snaps of the surroundings.








The nice thing about this group is that they are a very hardy bunch, so the rain didn't stop us from renting a very tippy, very rickety old aluminum canoe and paddling around a bit.






It started raining even harder and we headed back to shore. There was much cursing as I made everybody stay in the canoe while I dug out the camera for one last photo.

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Life is calling, more later.