river trips

Rafters floating the Gates of Lodore section of the Green River through Dinosaur National Monument.

Why Conservation Matters: Rafting the Green River’s Gates of Lodore

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By Michael Lanza

The momentarily sedate current of the Green River pulls our flotilla of five rafts and two kayaks toward what looks like a geological impossibility: a gigantic cleft at least a thousand feet deep, where the river appears to have chopped a path right through the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah. Sheer, cracked cliffs of burgundy-brown rock frame the gap. Box elder, juniper, and a few cottonwoods grow on broad sand bars backed by tiered walls that seem to reach infinitely upward and backward, eclipsing broad swaths of blue sky. A great blue heron stalks fish by the riverbank. We notice movement on river left and glance over to see two bighorn sheep dash up a rocky canyon wall so steep that none of us can imagine even walking up it.

These are the Gates of Lodore, portal to a canyon as famous today for its scenery and wilderness character as it was infamous for the catastrophes suffered by its first explorers, who set out in wooden boats a century and a half ago to map the West’s greatest river system.

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Middle Fork Salmon River, Idaho.

Video: Rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River

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By Michael Lanza

On a six-day rafting and kayaking trip on one of the world’s premier wilderness rivers, Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon, my family and 21 friends and relatives enjoyed beautiful canyon scenery, great side hikes to waterfalls and overlooks hundreds of feet above the river, and big whitewater: The roughly 100-mile-long Middle Fork has some 300 ratable rapids, many of them class III and IV.

This video captures the unique beauty, thrills, and magic of rafting and kayaking the Middle Fork of the Salmon River.

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A raft filled with children running Cliffside Rapid on Idaho's Middle Fork Salmon River.

Big Water, Big Wilderness: Rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River

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By Michael Lanza

Standing on the rocky bank of Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, deep within the second-largest U.S. wilderness outside Alaska, my 14-year-old son, Nate, and I look down at the foaming, frothing, spitting energy of Marble Rapid—the first big whitewater of our six-day rafting and kayaking trip down one of the world’s premier wilderness rivers. One of our guides, Matt Leidecker, points to the rapid’s entrance, where the river makes a hard, 90-degree right turn at a “hole,” a depression where the roaring current recirculates powerfully enough to toss a person in a kayak around like a bathtub toy. “I’ve seen that hole keep kayaks,” he warns us.

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Rafting the Grand Ronde River, Oregon.

Stacking the Deck For Adventure: Rafting Oregon’s Wallowa and Grand Ronde Rivers

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By Michael Lanza

The Wallowa River hisses and slithers past us like a fat snake with ill intentions. An urgent line of muscular waves emits a constant, low rumble on this June morning at the launch site in the tiny burg of Minam, Oregon. The outfitter who rented us our rafts informs us that this waterway and the Grand Ronde River, which we will enter nine miles downstream, are running high enough to whisk our two rafts down the course of this 45-mile, normally three-day stretch of whitewater in just 10 hours.

Then he tells us that the first bit of technical whitewater we’ll encounter, Minam Roller Rapids, has flipped several rafts in recent days—and its hole is “guaranteed” to toss us into the frigid, snowmelt-fed water, too, if we fail to make the turn there hugging the right riverbank tightly. That grabs our attention in a hurry.

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River of Many Stories: Canoeing New Zealand’s Stunning Whanganui

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By Michael Lanza

Within minutes after launching our canoe into the chocolate-brown and, at the moment, tranquil Whanganui River, in the southwestern corner of New Zealand’s North Island, I begin to get a sense of why the native Maori people believed that every bend in this striking waterway had a mauri, or “life force.” We’ve entered a nearly unbroken gorge of sheer sandstone and mudstone cliffs soaring up to 200 feet straight out of the water, draped with jungle-like foliage in infinite hues of green. Cicadas buzz and rattle almost deafeningly. Ribbon waterfalls pour in straight, pencil-thin lines down walls so oversaturated that they weep tears from every fern and leaf.

The Maori are right: this place is very much alive.

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