Relaxed trip to kayak a river

[BlackBart]

Just a nice Saturday trip with Betty the Volvo to go on a paddle down a winding section of the Clearwater river before it enters Seeley Lake in Montana. Lovely drive up the Blackfoot River valley (a river does run through it), then turn left at the big plastic cow and up the Seeley-Swan valley. Road twists past beautiful Salmon Lake. Only an hour drive.

A cold front arrived, pushing all the smoke and 100 degrees and tourists away, apparently. It started to sprinkle and we had the whole place to ourselves. The beauty of this little spot is you don't have to have two cars and shuttle. It's a nice 30 minute hike through a lush forest back to the launch spot.

I like this car more the longer we have it.

That's a boat in there.

It comes in bags so you can throw it on a train or a float plane, and go anywhere.
These canvas bags are starting to shred. This boat is 60 years old. My father bought it new in 1961. We took it everywhere, paddled camped. It's been from Lake Powell in AZ to all over Colorado to Seattle and Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands to Montana and Glacier Park. It's called a Klepper, made in Germany, and you can still buy one, and still buy replacement parts.

It's mahogany & birch, very light, very strong.

In true wooden boat tradition, first you lay the keel! (It was still dry at this point - this parking turned to mud)

Put the skin on, and then it's a boat! It has two inflated sponsons along the sides of the hull, which tighten the wood frame and the whole thing becomes a stressed structure, but flexes and moves with waves. It's ingenious. Weighs 70 lbs, carries 850 lbs.

The first hull was blue, it lasted 40 years. We went for high vis red in 2004, much better on big lakes.

These were a splurge a few years ago - they're so beautiful, and weigh nothing.

In the old days before the canvas shrunk, everything fit inside the bags - the seats, the paddles. Now we have a tupperware boat box.

[BlackBart]

So we launched into a tiny dead-end slough maybe 6 feet wide, figured out which way to turn at the stream (down stream wasn't exactly clear!) Didn't put on the rudder because it was so shallow and twisty. I snagged the flag on a branch, we had to reverse engines and back out!

We were down below the banks, which are thick and lush. Tall stands of pine trees were blowing and leaning, but mostly calm down on the stream. Tons of birds and ducks. It twists and turns and goes what seems like upstream and there are intersections with dead-end oxbows. Sand and gravel bars, we drug bottom a couple of times. It started to sprinkle and was so pretty, just dots on the water. By the time it started to really rain, we were already wet, so you're soggy inside your shell, mmm! And cotton shorts were dumb. 50 degrees. Oh well. We're so glad it's not 100 and on fire.

You'll notice there are no pics of any of this leg! The phone was in a zip-loc bag and it was pouring rain, so no media coverage, sorry.

As it got wider, we thought oh, there must be side streams entering. Nope, you're at lake level and it's backed up. So you're not cruising downstream any more...but still more twists and bends. It was cool. As we got closer to the lake, there were water lilies blooming. Tons of them, white and some bright yellow. At the head of the lake there were acres of them, very nice.

We headed across the top of the lake to the ranger station, where there's a marked take-out spot and loading area. Here's the path to shore through the last of the lilies.

Nice walk though the woods along the stream back to the put-in. We were soaked through.

I just threw everything in the car loose and wet, and we drove with the defroster blasting all the way home. Stopped for a hot tea and ate trail bars!

Then I draped it all over the courtyard to dry. Then it rained overnight.

Just like old Volvos - I'm making a list of little aluminum fittings to get and replace, and do something about the crumbling bags and seat rests

[volvolugnut]

That is a very cool watercraft!
When I was in college at Kansas State University, I participated in several canoe races on the Kansas river from Manhattan to Lawrence, Kansas (home of University of Kansas). It was a two day team race with a overnight stop and restart the next day based on your time in the first day. After several years we had good spots found for team changes every few miles. Total mileage was about 100. Sometimes the river was near flood stage. We did lots of foolish things, but had no major injuries.
After college, I went with a brother in law on a one day canoe trip on the Middle Loop river in Nebraska. This river flows at a moderate pace through the sand hill ranch country. One bad thing was the ranchers liked to hang barb wire across the river on the occasional ranch boundary. I got a cut, but it healed ok.

volvolugnut