Rivers soak into your bones.
I was 12 when my father and I received an invitation from a group of his friends to raft the remote Selway River in Idaho. A city kid from the Northeast, I was unaccustomed to the loamy smells of the Western wilderness and astonished by these roughshod river rats who spent their days joyously chasing water. One of their raft trailers featured a hand-painted sign that read, “No matter where you at, there you are.”
My father and I would later accompany this crew on some of the West’s great rivers — the Snake, the Clearwater, the Salmon, the San Juan. We rafted Desolation Canyon in Utah and Colorado’s Gates of Lodore, a red rock chasm that seems to defy gravity above the jewel-like Green River.
A river seduces you from the very first moment you push off from shore, when you sense that first insistent pull of current, the frenetic churn of white water giving way to the hypnotic stillness of an eddy. Each night at camp, after a day of chasing water, after the best meal of your life, you drift into a dreamless sleep against the gentle hush of the river on its way to whatever tomorrow will bring.
This past summer, our family was invited to a wedding in Bozeman, Mont. I now had two boys of my own, Holt, 10, and Max, 7, and wanted them to feel the current’s steady tug, to taste that first jet of white water as it leaped from the river and smacked you in the face. So I looked into the possibility of a river float in Montana.
I found a three-day, two-night trip run by Glacier Raft Company down the Middle Fork of the Flathead, named for the Salish (Flathead) people who lived in the watershed alongside the Kootenai and Kalispel. The Middle Fork hugs the southern border of Glacier National Park just beneath the Continental Divide, weaving through alpine forests of lodgepole pine, western larch and black cottonwood.
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