116-Rafting The Blackfoot, Day 2

In which Boy Scout Troop 116 continues its float down Montana's Blackfoot River and the boys take a turn at captaining the raft, with predictably disastrous results

Saturday, July 29, 2006

I was awakened nest morning by a woodpecker practicing his Morse code and the honking of Canada geese. Though hiking can take you to a greater variety of places, river trips trump backpacking in two key areas. You can just roll off your craft for a refreshing dunk in the river whenever you get overheated, and the boat can carry a ton of stuff—think: steak dinners with wine (not that the Boy Scouts guzzle Cabernet, but for rafting or kayaking in general).

In other words, we breakfasted not on the backpacker's staples of oatmeal, granola bars, and instant coffee, but rather on sausages, Dutch oven biscuits, cantaloupe, and scrambled eggs laden with onions, peppers, tomato, and the chopped-up remains of last night's burgers and bratwursts.

The boys went for a run while the adults did another car shuffle to get a vehicle at our take-out point.

The rapids were a bit more, well, rapid today, with fewer bottom-scraping shallows (or perhaps we were just getting better at avoiding them). The landscape changed a bit, with more spruce, juniper and lodgepole pines and higher rocky cliffs occasionally hemming us in on the sides. Stew, Agnew, and I played water football/monkey-in-the-middle from the duckies.

Swallows skimmed the waters after insects. Fish jumped out of the water for same. Huge flocks of the brown-headed gray ducks they have around here swam frantically in one direction to get away from us then, once we inevitably overtook them, turned around to run away in the other direction.

Rafting without a License

After we let the boys work the duckies for a bit, we discovered a snake in the raft, so we switched out and let the boys have the raft all to themselves, alternating guides as they managed to hang themselves up on just about every rock the river had to offer.

From the adult point of view in the duckies, this was hilarious, especially when they squeezed some poor tuber against the rocks, causing his inner tube to pop straight up into the air in one direction and send him sailing in a graceless arc in the other.

(The boys exhibited excellent river etiquette in offering him beer from the raft cooler by way of recompense, but poor scouting judgment in that the beer they gave away belong to their adult leaders.)

Finally, there was some sort of mutiny aboard the raft. The boys fired Quinn and put Karis in the guide seat at the back, after which they actually gelled as a team and paddled perfectly through one of the biggest rapids of the day.

After lunch, Dan drilled them in river rescue techniques, having them flip the raft and then flip it back a few times, then sending one pair of boys at a time upriver to jump into the mild rapids and play victims while another pair stood by the shore and threw lifelines to haul them to safety.

The river slowly filled with weekend tubers as the afternoon wore on. The practical upshot of this (other than providing the boys with yet another river hazard—this time moving and alive—which they could fail to avoid), was that suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by lots of drunk women in bikinis, nearly all of whom the boys failed utterly to engage in conversation (though at one point Stew and Agnew in the Stewberry double-duckie were dragging some amiable, beer-clutching woman along by her foot for a chat, and later I found a trio of tubers deep in their cups and belting out tunes. They asked for requests, and the four of us—I was way ahead of the boys in the raft and needed to slow down anyway—drifted along with the current, working our way through most of the Big Chill soundtrack).

Quinn cooked us some excellent steaks and peppers for dinner, atoning a bit for his utter lack of raft guiding skills. The four adults polished off several bottles of wine. We had the boys do 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and it came off very well—perhaps because the boys got Dutch over brownies after they read off the five things they had seen (the bald eagle tied with the girl in the blue bikini—and we all knew exactly which one we were talking about—for most people's list), four things they'd heard (the rushing water of the river won hand's down), three things they'd smelled (most of them Ari), two things they felt (sore muscles was popular on that one), and one thing they knew (many agreed on that one that we were glad to have come on this trip).