Category: Canoeing
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Stuff I made last year: Mad River Revelation rescue
Two years ago it was becoming obvious that floating was going to be a major part of our family life for a number of years, if not forever. Backpacking and hiking with smaller kids is great and very doable and also profoundly limiting, with a necessarily slow pace changing the planning landscape from time BK…
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Lincoln-Missoula downriver regatta
The idea: paddle the Blackfoot (and Clark Fork) from Lincoln, Montana to Missoula in less than 24 hours. Like with the Bob Open 12 years ago, I’m quite sure this will work, but need to figure out the details by doing it. So that will happen this year. Lincoln (at the Stemple Pass road bridge)…
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Patagonia STP Hoody; final thoughts
I’ve been using the Stretch Terre Planing hoody almost daily, and almost exclusively, for 18 months. It has proved to be as ideal a windshirt as I can imagine, without falling into hyperbolic hopes concerning future fabrics. As I detailed in the post last year, my windshirt quest has over the past decade consisted in…
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The DY Special: on the water
It is an easy cliche that gear matters less than will when it comes to executing a given outdoor activity, one whose heart is in the right, but ignores many practical details. We now have eight boats on the premises, but neither the four packrafts nor the whitewater canoe nor the freightor canoe nor the…
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The DY Special, prelude
In early September last year I was cruising Craigslist for random boats, as one does, and saw something scary. I kept coming back over the next week, and eventually told myself that were the thing still for sale when I came back from a hunting trip, I would call about it. There was little doubt…
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Petzl Swift RL review
Montana at the start of winter is, to state the obvious, dark. On December 22nd we have 8 and a half hours of daylight, and by today, over a month later, we only have an hour more. Provided you can tolerate the cold and have enough interests, there is never a shortage of things to…
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Things from 2021
Astute readers may have noticed that, back in mid spring, photo quality here took a turn. The previous fall my long standing iPhone 5se took a dive (literally, on main stream in Escalante) and after 4 months of tape holding chunks of the screen in, reliability mandated a new phone. I’d spent the winter putting…
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little Big Blackfoot bikeraft loops
As opposed to the Little Blackfoot, whose headwaters are too small and brushy for good floating, the Big Blackfoot River rarely runs parallel to a road, something that makes for convenient and high quality floating. The middle section of the Big Blackfoot and its tributaries, which is to say the bit in the Helmville/Ovando valley,…
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The Fantasy
Make no mistake, this is a silly boat. Just as it has been a silly, unusual, and in some respects unpleasant summer. The heat rolled in at the very beginning of June, and baked me thoroughly during an exploratory trip on the upper reaches of Tenderfoot Creek. With the exception of a cool and rainy…
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Bark River Micro Canadian re-scale
For the past four years my Micro Canadian has always been one of my very favorite objects. It blends practicality and elegance in a way which few other categories of things can. Restlessness, and extreme specialization (river rescue), are the only real reasons I’ve used anything else. To address the former I bought a Bark…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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