You are in for the trek of your life! Putting in a narrow swift-running rock-bottomed clear stream at Three Forks, Montana you'll keep looking back over your shoulder at the snow-capped Bitterroot Mountains where Lewis and Clark crossed to the Colombia River. Soon you'll be portaging around your first dam, Toston dam, a tiny one, but an indicator of what's ahead in the first two thirds of your journey: 14 dams to portage before you get totally free waters in the final 700 miles to St. Louis.

At Townsend you'll enter your first big lake, Canyon Ferry Lake, infamous for its abrupt storms where the rollers can get higher than your boat is long. You'll keep your eye on the sky while on this beautiful lake. It can also be a smooth as glass, especially if you canoe it in the late evening as the sun is setting.

After a horrendous portage around Canyon Ferry dam you'll pop around two smaller dams, Hauser and Holter, then roar down Wolf Creek Canyon where you'll swear the river looks like a gradual descending hill for several dozen miles. Steep canyon walls tower above you before the river slows and begins to meander toward Great Falls. Watch for sheep on those cliffs.

It took Lewis and Clark a month to portage around this series of falls, dropping four times more feet than Niagara. There are five dams here, but if you know how to connect with the local canoe club, it won't take you a month, but only a day (see data chapter for phone number of contact). While in Great Falls you'll probably visit the Lewis & Clark Interpretive center, world famous for its excellence. Maybe you'll see the largest spring in the world nearby as well. Discovered by Lewis and Clark, it boils out of the ground at river-rate. (It is also considered the "shortest river in the world") Below the Great Falls you'll just have a short hop to Ft. Benton, the "upper end of the line" during the steamboat era. In the late 1800’s Ft. Benton was Denver. If you didn't plan a motel night for this delightful tiny historic town, you'll wish you had.

Just out of Ft. Benton you’ll enter the National Wild and Scenic River section, which, combined with the following section, is the most remote run on the river. Towering cliffs rise from the river's edge where you'll see mountain sheep skipping about on rock-climbing cliffs. You'll get out and climb up into the "Hole in the Wall" a three-people size hole right through a sandstone wall perched high above the river. You'll use one of those panoramic disposable cameras to snap awe-inspiring photos thorough the hole. Continuing on you'll meet Grace Sanford, in her 80's yet stills running the dirt-road (not gravel, but a real dirt-road) ferry several times a day in this remote land. "Oh, sometimes we get real busy on weekends and I run it over ten times." Trees are so rare in this section they are marked on the maps. And they are in demand for campsites to escape the blazing heat of the Big Sky sun.

But your wilderness is not finished yet. Immediately upon leaving the Wild and Scenic River you'll enter two adjacent wildlife refuges surrounding the 130 mile long Ft. Peck Lake. And what a lake it is! Remote, large, and packed with wildlife you'll love this wild and scenic lake. So far on your trek you'll have already seen mountain sheep, elk, pronghorn antelopes, mule deer galore, white tailed deer, prairie dogs (Lewis & Clark called them "Barking squirrels," probably a better name) the tiny swift fox, maybe a badger, a black-footed ferret, and a long tailed weasel, plenty of beavers and whole beaver-cut forests, maybe a coyote or two, (at least you heard them) plus a myriad of birds including the constantly cheerful Western Meadowlark, the white Snowy Owl, the Sharp-tailed Grouse, Sand hill crane, Upland Sandpiper, Golden and Bald Eagles, and thousands of White Pelicans plus scores of species of ducks. The whole trek so far has been one elongated wildlife refuge, and you are just now entering the official ones!

You'll probably be storm bound a day or two on Ft. Peck Lake, but you won’t care -- you’ll take plenty of extra food and you'll snuggle up in your cozy tent and catch up on your reading in the Lewis & Clark journals or write letters home. You'll end up your 300 miles of wilderness by staying at the Ft. Peck Hotel, the original building constructed when 30,000 people rushed to find jobs during the depression in this grand WPA-FDR type project. Other than a 60's style carpet upgrade everything, else is pretty much unchanged since the Depression. You'll love your stay and the hotel management will go out of their way to make trekkers like you feel welcome, right down to fetching you and your boat from the landing, saving you the mile long portage.

Below Ft. Peck Dam the river is usually shallow and meandering, and you'll coast down the lazy curves now with whole forests of cottonwood trees and willow bottoms lining the banks. Here you may discover several places where you can still ford the river without getting over your head. The river here is bordered by Indian Reservations.

Then you'll stop at Ft. Union, a completely reconstructed trading fort before canoeing the short hop to the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone. The red-mud Yellowstone, if you hit this spot in early June, will be swollen with snow melt from Yellowstone Park and the Rocky Mountains. (Sorry, the Yellowstone is not yellow but red. Yellow is reserved for the Osage, much later down stream.) This new surge of water volume will speed you along into the next lake.

As you pass Williston you'll wonder if you'll ever escape the tangled spaghetti bowl channels, backwaters, and oxbows of the Williston Marsh. But you'll keep following the current and eventually you'll come out on the delightfully beautiful Sakakawea Lake, named for the Indian woman guide and interpreter who accompanied Lewis and Clark (with her little boy on her back!) Dakotans spell and pronounce her name differently than the official USA mint pronunciation, and they insist they are correct. If you say otherwise they’ll enjoy an argument with you. And they’ll enjoy winning.

Lake Sakakawea is usually called "the river" by those who live near it, running some 175 miles, narrow and long, bordered by lush green hillsides and herds of range cattle. Perhaps it will be on this lake where you sleep tentless and see what the Big Sky looks like at night. Maybe you'll have purchased one of those glow-in-the dark sky maps and here is where you'll learn a dozen new constellations. Also, the endangered Whooping Crane uses this lake as a rest stop in its migrations. After many days you'll arrive at Garrison Dam, signaling the end of this delightful long and narrow lake. There is yet another long narrow lake-river ahead of you. But you must stop in Bismarck first.

You'll be both happy and irritated to be back on the river. Happy to have a current again, but irritated at the sand bars and snags. You'll most likely stop at the excellent Lewis and Clark Center in Washburn ND and see a hand-made 30' cottonwood dugout canoe fashioned on the Lewis and Clark pattern of the day. You’ll feel better about portaging your canoe after seeing this one! Perhaps you'll reward your arrival at the 1000 mile mark with a few days off in Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, but a smallish friendly town of about 30,000.

Soon after Bismarck you'll be in a lake again -- indeed the same lake through the rest of North Dakota and most of the north-south trek through South Dakota. Oahe is more like a super-river, narrow and long, lined with green grazing land and increasingly on the left shore actual crops. However it would be a mistake to assume Oahe as an easy paddle. If the wind is right (or, rather, wrong) the waves will rise to three to four feet and even if you have two excellent paddlers, there are some days you can't stay even and will be wind bound. If you are solo and using a little kicker, you will seem so tiny, as you sit in the troughs and stare horizontally at the tops of the waves on either side of you. The trick is to make plenty of miles in this lakes when it is calm, then sit out the big windstorms.

But high waves perhaps won't be the greatest threat to your trek when you get to the endless Lake Oahe. If you are trekking the entire Missouri River you will probably face a greater challenge: boredom. By now you will have become acclimated to life on the river. You'll be used to the open prairies, beautiful sunsets, wildlife, and picture-postcard scenes. The Bitterroot mountains, Great Falls, and conquering Ft. Peck lake are now a distant memory. Your thoughts will turn to St. Louis. You'll likely get out all your maps and try to predict a firm finish date. You'll start counting miles downward (to St. Louis) instead of upward (from your starting point in Montana). And you'll figure out some day after you've been on the river for more than a month that you still are only half way through!

Like marathon runners "hit the wall" and thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail hit Pennsylvania and New York, you'll think your trek will never end. Trekkers in the "middle miles" of their journey often experience these doldrums. If you meet one you can see it in their glazed look. Experienced trekkers simply put it on "auto pilot" and eat up the miles of the middle section until the "countdown miles" look manageable again. It is in this middle section when trekkers often forget the date, or day, or even where they camped two nights ago... they just plod on, hoping the excitement will eventually return. Often journals dry up, and trekkers won’t share with their partner how they feel, hoping secretly something will go wrong so they can go home. The "middle miles malaise" is something like homesickness.

If you come down with a case of this malaise, resist the urge to give up. Refuse to say, "it's not fun anymore" or "I've had enough." In a week or two you'll be through all the South Dakota lakes and around all the final dam portages, and you'll get your second wind. It is during the last third of the journey where your memory of the whole trip comes together. You'll remember vividly campsites and scenes from a thousand miles ago, and the whole trek will begin to find "convergence" in your mind, no longer running in sequence, but now remembered as a collage. This is trek "convergence." Jumping out early robs the trekker of this convergence experience. Better to simply go on auto pilot or take a week off when you get to Sioux City Iowa.

A sort of mini-Oahe, just 80 miles long, you'll clip through this lake faster, perhaps stopping in delightfully clean and neat Pierre, South Dakota's capital city, and at Lower Brule a "capital" of sorts of the reservation. The fascinating feature of the river (even though it is dammed up, everyone calls it "the river") on Lake Sharpe is the fantastic "Brule Big Bend." Here the river meanders in one gigantic 25 mile loop to return to the neck just 1 1/2 miles from where you were many hours before, or even a day earlier if the wind is wrong.

If you had the "middle miles malaise" you may lose it in this lake, where you'll pass the 1000 mile countdown mark. At Chamberlain, SD you'll float under I90 and figure you've got 969 miles left to St. Louis. Even though this lake extends 107 miles you'll be anxious to finish it (and the next shorter one) to be in the river un-dammed the rest of the way to St. Louis.

Your final lake is short and sweet -- just 30 miles long and the last dam portage of the journey -- even if you are continuing all the way to New Orleans, for from this point to St. Louis there are no dams, and even beyond that, there are locks for every dam.

At Sioux City you’ll really feel near the final run down the river. Here you’ll likely see the river boat/museum which was dragged out of the river and perched on the shore. Maybe you’ll take some time off to celebrate the end of the difficult waters of the lakes, and to catch your breath for the final push down the "channeled" all-river section to St. Louis. Maybe you’ll stop off on the left shore to pay respects at the monument to Sergeant Floyd, the only loss of life on the Lewis and Clark trek. In all, when you leave Sioux City you should be refreshed for the final float down a faster-flowing river to St. Louis.

From Sioux City to the mouth of the Missouri you’ll be on totally different waters. The Missouri is easily divided into three kinds of water. About a third of the route runs through wild and natural river, largely undisturbed since Lewis and Clark traveled the river 200 years ago. A second third of the Missouri’s route is through large lakes established by the Corps of Engineer’s dams. Now you will enter the final third of the miles: the "industrial Canal" segment.

Here you’ll run down the "channeled" Missouri where the current is swift and the channel narrow. You’ll be thinking of St. Louis often, and you’ll be ready to end this journey. Luckily that will be easier in the swift-running current where you’ll often be able to double the miles you were accustomed to making each day on the lakes.

You’ll see more towns now, and enjoy stopping off at the many river towns established by immigrants in the land rush era. You’ll speed through the remaining 735 miles and soon reach the mouth of the Missouri just above St. Louis. By then you will have determined that the Missouri is really the main channel, and that the Mississippi is just one more river flowing into this mighty river which became a tributary of the other river only by a fluke of history.

Perhaps you’ll determine to canoe the extra 15 miles to end your trek under the St. Louis arch, a monument to Westward expansion.

Though this lower river is less wild, it will serve you as an excellent transition back to ordinary life. Indeed, it will be during the lower river segment of the entire trek that you will experience "convergence" -- where the entire trek melds together into one experience in your memory.

And just hours after ending your trek, you’ll be in an air conditioned automobile whisking home. At home, people will ask you all kinds of questions about your trek, which you’ll dutifully answer, but there will be no way you can fully explain the incredible journey to them. You’ll be worn out, and it may take weeks to recover. Physically, that is. For you will never "recover" otherwise from such a trek. You won't want to. It will soon have become so integrated into your self, that the trek will become part of who you will be for the rest of your life. And, you’ll be forever grateful you took the risk to do it.