Survival

Survival. I promised to report that just before I left with six friends for five days in the North Dakota Bad Lands. Three canoes and a kayak, seven one-man tents, a whole bunch of coolers, a modest (by someone’s definition) amount of alcohol, and quite a lot of the meat of cows and pigs floated from the Limber Pines area to the Ponderosa Pines area of the Badlands on the Little Missouri River Sunday through Thursday.

That’s all I’m going to say. What happens on The River stays on The River. Except for this:

34 years ago, some friends from Bismarck-Mandan decided to find out what it would be like to canoe on the Little Missouri. They liked it. A lot. This was the 35th annual excursion, a pretty amazing feat for a group of men. The cast and the venue have changed a little over the years. Two of the early members are dead now, two have moved to distant spots and no longer return. Of the four remaining early members, only one has been on all 35 trips. But one has been on 34, one on 33, and one on close to 30. Some of the trips have been on the Wild and Scenic stretch of the Upper Missouri River in Montana, commonly known as the White Cliffs area. A few have been just camping or hiking trips because of logistics or low water. But mostly we've gone to the Little Missouri River.

I think we were all in our twenties when this started. Now, for most of us, the first number in our age is 6. We’ve slowed and stiffened a little (one member this year said “The canoes are getting lower,” as he struggled to get out), but each trip still ends with a short discussion of next year’s trip. It was suggested this year that next year’s agenda include both the Little Missouri in the Spring and the Upper Missouri in the Fall. We’ve never done that before. We’ll see. At our age, recovery from these excursions takes a while. At least from Spring until Fall.

Jeff Weispfenning has put some scenic pictures from this year’s trip up on Facebook. You can go to his page and look if you want. I’m sharing the group photo of some pretty mangy looking guys at the end of the trip. For the record, they are Bill Knudson, Larry Dopson, Mike Burbach, Jim Fuglie, Mike Jacobs, Ken Rogers and Jeff Weispfenning.

35 years. We marveled some at that on this trip. Here’s what I marveled at: For the first time in 35 years, I forgot to pack toilet paper. That made me very creative. A guy just doesn’t go asking his friends to borrow some toilet paper.

But I survived. We all did. And it was great.