Yellowstone River Canoe Trip
Sawyer's Paddleabout on the Yellowstone

words by Alan Kesselheim
first appeared in Canoe & Kayak December, 2007

When Sawyer was born, late one March night in our bedroom, he was not ready. His face was red, his fists clenched. His body language screamed “NOT YET!” For the first three days of life, he wouldn’t open his eyes.

He wasn’t an easy infant, either. He needed a lot of soothing, a lot of walking and comforting. He was one of those babies that required a two-person team to change a diaper. He seemed to have an unaccountable level of frustration pent up. He’d periodically fall prey to alarming bouts of inconsolability—like he was in the grasp of some sort of anguish and had no way to cope. By the same token, he has possessed, from birth, an uncommon awareness of the larger world. Even as a baby, people would look at him and say, “That kid looks wise.” Every year, his teachers comment on his perceptiveness. Who knows, perhaps overcoming whatever angst possessed him as a toddler has helped shape the sensitive, humorous, likeable kid he’s become.

Here, on this August day, he is 13, with the lean build and stamina of a cross-country runner. He is leading the family up the trail to Marston Pass, deep in the Washakie Wilderness of northern Wyoming. It is mid-morning on day three of our hike. For the second summer running, we are returning to one of the kid’s “birth rivers,” the flows we paddled when we were pregnant with them. Last year it was Eli’s turn, on the Kazan in the barrenland heart of northern Canada. This summer it is Sawyer. The river is the Yellowstone.

We have already toiled up more than 20 miles of trail on the way to the alpine headwaters of Sawyer’s river. The trail switchbacks uphill, leaving trees behind. I’m bringing up the rear. Marypat, the three kids, and the dog, Beans, string out ahead. Alpine valleys, green as velvet, glimmer far below. At the crest of trail, where the weathered sign confirms the pass elevation of 10,300 feet, the Absaroka Mountains surround us. The Tetons float in the distance. Verdant tundra rolls in every direction. The headwaters of the Yellowstone River are close by—over a ridge and around a corner, somewhere in the airy, bear-thick wilderness near 11,000 feet.

This hike is a pilgrimage. River headwaters are like that—inaccessible by definition, indistinct, elusive, mysterious. There is something primordial about the source of a drainage, and it exerts an irresistible magnetism. I think of all the expeditions mounted to locate headwaters—the Amazon, the Nile, the Congo, the Mississippi, the Yukon—the fortunes squandered, the people who died trying, the national pride at stake. Our quest is not on the same scale, but it is no less momentous in the fabric of our family history.

During the summer of 1992, Marypat and I paddled the entire Yellowstone with Sawyer’s older brother, Eli, in the bow. Eli was eight months old, just thinking about walking, doing some serious teething, and going through diapers at an impressive clip. Sawyer was along for the ride too, as a fetal bud. He was feeling that jostling current under our red canoe, getting vicarious doses of adrenaline and whatever else pulsed his way through Marypat.

Our hike is Part II of his coming-of-age quest, an added feature to the repeat descent of the Yellowstone, which was Part I, played out a month earlier. All of it addresses Sawyer’s passage to adulthood, the transition our culture is so lame about.

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Sawyer barely crests 100 pounds, but he's comfortable in class 3 water and already has a trip resume many adults will never achieve.

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The Yellowstone is coy to the end. It isn’t until we round a final slope that the snowfield nestled above the thin, clear trickle comes into view. Ruby beelines to the river’s edge. The rest of us follow. It is narrow enough to step across.

We spontaneously drop to our bellies, side by side, and sink our faces into the icy, newborn river. We all drink deep. The liquid burns going down, sits cold in our bellies, seeps across our cell walls, becomes us.

Our hands are still callused from paddling. Our faces and arms are tanned from weeks under the sun, crossing Montana in 25-mile daily chunks. In all likelihood, we still have grains of river sand in our clothes and shoes, even in the roots of our hair. The river we drink from, 10 paces from the melting snow that creates it, is embedded in our memories, stamped on our synapses, rooted deep in our imaginations. Like the water we drink, it has become us.

In late June, when we put onto the Yellowstone at the border of Yellowstone National Park, just upstream from the bridge in Gardiner, Montana, the mountains were still cloaked under deep snows. The river was running high, thick with sediment, roaring along, pure and untamed.