The Missouri Breaks

What a night it was!

While it was a clear and starry night when I got up for a pee about 1am, all hell broke loose about 3am and it rained solid and with a vengeance (fully accompanied by gale force winds). Seriously… it was bending the tent over at times!

Now, to be fair, we’ve been in bigger winds on some of the earlier trips. Through the Gorge on the Columbia River we faced days of relentless wind. And on a few stretches of the Mackenzie River in the Canadian Arctic it was blowing so hard it started to move the big 26’ voyageur canoes down the riverbank. (Yes, we tie the down at night). 🙂

Anyway, by the time I got up at about 7am, the rain had stopped but the winds carried on, though somewhat abated. This was our day to sort out what was going in the canoe for our ‘wilderness’ sections of the trip. Thankfully, Kris had the bulk of that sorted out, but it still had lots of input from others and the peanut gallery.

Around noon, the discussion turned to the paddle section that had been planned for today but that was being threatened by the rain and wind. In the end, we decided that, at 24km and with improving skies, we would head upstream to Carter Ferry for the put-in.

We were on the water by about 3pm and began our trip down to Fort Benton. In Merle’s boat there was Kris, Val, Suzanne, and Richard. In our canoe there was Bob, me, Eugene, and Chuck was in the bow.

This was a great way to start this 10-day paddle trip. We had good moving water, and only one of our boats got hung up on a gravel bar for a few moments. The rest of the journey was filled with wonderful scenery, dramatic landscapes, and a comfortable pace. And there were birds….lots of birds: vultures, juvenile bald eagles, crows, clouds of swallow peeling out of the cliff side nests, pelicans, a nighthawk darting above the water, osprey, meadowlarks, robins and, oddly, pigeons.

From what I gather, the vertical riverbanks we saw along the way are a shadowy of what we’ll find in the more downstream reaches of the river. In fact, we’ll be paddling through what’s know as the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.

We made the trip back to Fort Benton by about 5:30, which was pretty good time for the distance and being our first day.

Dinner was another treat with mixed vegetables and shrimp with rice. Yum! This may sound a bit indulgent mentioning the meals along these travels, but given the work we do paddling and the time spent on the river, there’s nothing quite like a great dinner to cap off the day.