There are moments or places on rivers that feel like portals, like openings to other realms. Like the deep canyons of the Jarbridge and Bruneau rivers, where steam from natural hot springs rises in otherworldly swaths. Or the painted hoodoos that lend a lunar feel to the Lower Owyhee.
And then there are communities, human hamlets that are, themselves, gateways to rivers. We get excited about doing our pre-trip rounds through town, and we come to associate particular grocery or liquor stores or gas stations or city parks with the river trip itself. We find our favorite campgrounds or motels to stay at the night before launch, and our favorite splurgy dinners-out before days of eating from coolers.




In this short series, we highlight four river gateway towns. These are places I’ve come to know over repeated visits, before or after private trips, commercial trips, or the occasional field course. Surely you have— or will have— your own experiences to call on, your own anecdotes, memories, and impressions of these spaces between spaces, these sentinel communities that buzz at the brinks of beloved rivers.
The liminal quality of a portal, a gateway, is quite precious, as it demarcates the space between experiences, between realities. It’s good to pay attention to these in-between spaces, to notice ourselves within them, to spend a little time there before moving in one direction or another. With that, let’s spend a little time in Fort Benton, Montana.
Fort Benton, Montana
In north-central Montana, one big river defines a singular landscape.
The Missouri – aka “Big Muddy” or the “Mighty Mo”– is the longest river in the United States, flowing for nearly 2500 miles from its source in Montana’s Rocky Mountains to its confluence with the Mississippi at St. Louis, Missouri.
The Lower Missouri, channelized, straightened, and slowed by six mainstream dams and reservoirs, plus countless levees and tributary dams, is considered the “Center of Life” for the Great Plains. The Upper Missouri that flows across Montana, by contrast, is relatively wild. The Upper Missouri feels like a watery portal toward true histories, human legacies, and a relatively intact western river ecosystem.
Because it lacks any actual whitewater, people of all ages and experience levels can enjoy a trip down the Upper Missouri. In a mellow and meandering canoe journey, there’s potential for connection between families and friends as well as to ancient stories. You move slowly, making time for real presence and conversation.



You will likely begin your Upper Missouri adventure in a true gateway town, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in Montana: A community called Fort Benton. The Missouri runs through the heart of town, and as it leaves Fort Benton, the river enjoys federal Wild and Scenic protection until it passes through the Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a stunning 149-mile section through the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.
The Upper Missouri was a vital thoroughfare and lifeway for the people who lived – and still live – in and around its watershed. Before white settlement, tribes traveled from all across the Plains and from the Columbia Plateau, west of the Continental Divide, to hunt buffalo on the sagebrush expanses of the Upper Missouri River basin. For ambitious settlers, the Missouri River was the “Gateway to the West.”
At the start of the 19th century, fur traders, some of them following Lewis and Clark’s original route, paddled human-powered boats like bullboats, mackinaws, and canoes up the Missouri. Over the next two decades, steamboats became the predominant mode of trade and transport. Fort Benton (established in 1846) was considered the world’s most inland port during the steamboat era – the most upstream place a boat could reach while chugging against the sluggish current of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
Fort Benton later became a major jumping-off point for Montana and Idaho’s gold and silver rushes. Between 1853 and 1855, the territorial Governor of Washington, Isaac Stevens, led a party of Army surveyors, topographic engineers, and documentarian artists from Minnesota to Montana on a scoping mission for the eventual transcontinental railroad, a more efficient way to connect east and west.
In 1855, Stevens called together representatives from tribes across the Rockies and the Great Plains to sign his Blackfoot – or Lame Bull – Treaty. They met at the Missouri’s confluence with the Judith River, nearly 90 miles downstream of Fort Benton. On the Freeflow field courses we run on the Missouri, we conclude our floats with a stay on the American Prairie Reserve, in a cabin atop a bluff that overlooks this very place.
Imagining a congregation of legendary Indigenous leaders here is a powerful exercise. It’s also a potent reminder of inescapable truths about our country’s history of exploration and western expansion: Upriver exploration on the Missouri paved the way for white settlement; treaties laid the groundwork for the systematic eradication of Indians and buffalo from the western landscape.


By 1890, after railroad tracks were laid and dams obstructed the Missouri. One criterion for Wild designation under the Wild and Scenic Act is that the river be “free of impoundments and generally inaccessible except by trail, with watersheds or shorelines essentially primitive and waters unpolluted.”
At Great Falls, a Montana city named for a place where the Missouri once tumbled over five dramatic and natural waterfalls, dams have altered or submerged all but one of the falls. Despite these impoundments, the Missouri was granted Wild and Scenic protection because the dams at Great Falls primarily affect flow over the falls themselves, and the river downstream remains relatively unaffected and is a crucial habitat for hundreds of species.
Today, 67 native fish species call the Missouri home, most of them in need of protection, including the American paddlefish, which can grow to weigh 140 lbs. On land, you’ll share the river corridor with prairie superstars like sage grouse, mule deer, pronghorn, snakes, and bighorn sheep. Beavers and turtles call this place home, too.
“Breaks” are places where the brittle rock has eroded or broken away, leaving fractures and fissures throughout the river corridor. The Breaks on the Missouri are like geologic windows through time – portals that might lead to a more accurate, more intimate understanding of history, people, and animals on a rare and magnificent landscape.
Logistical Notes
The biggest environmental stressors on the Upper Missouri, depending on the season during which you’re there, might be significant wind, relentless sun, and immodest cattle. A pre-launch visit to the BLM’s Missouri Breaks Interpretive Center is an excellent way to orient yourself to the landscape you’re about to float through.


From Fort Benton, you can head off to various sections of the Upper Missouri. The most popular run is likely the White Cliffs section between Coal Banks and Judith Landing. (You might compare your own field notes with those that Lewis wrote when he passed through the White Cliffs section in 1805:
“a thousand grotesque figures, pyramids, and lofty, freestone buildings, their parapets well-stocked with statuary… so perfect indeed are those walls that I should have thought that nature attempted here to rival the human art of masonry had I not recollected that she had first begun her work.”
Below Judith Landing, the landscape morphs into wild badlands that are also well worth exploring.
The Bureau of Land Management offers solid resources for boaters and hikers in the National Monument, including quality Boaters’ Guides with maps and a comprehensive FAQ on the website. If you’d like to leave the logisticizing to a professional, there are numerous outfitters who run guided canoe trips through the Breaks, even in the cold of “elbow season” (late November).
You can check flows (which regularly fluctuate between 4000 and 20,000 CFS) on the USGS gauge sites like this one.
Places to Sleep/Explode Your Gear
Fort Benton has a wonderful riverside trail that parallels the Missouri through town. While you can’t (or probably shouldn’t?) sleep in the river park, there are many fine patches of grass here to have a picnic and sort through your gear.
A cool spot in Loma, near Coal Banks, offers funky accommodations: Virgelle Mercantile.
For a taste of steamboat-era glamor and the fanciest digs in Fort Benton, check out the historic Grand Union Hotel.
There’s non-reservable camping at one of the most popular boat launches you’ll use, including Coal Banks, a potential put-in for the White Cliffs section. The BLM has established four types of camping options: developed access sites and campgrounds; developed boat ramps (which, like the campgrounds, have vault toilets and fire rings); primitive boat ramps (only have fire rings, only accessible by boat, no toilets); and dispersed public land.



Always practice Leave No Trace ethics and check on fire restrictions before you go.
Last Minute Provisions
A small grocery store in downtown Fort Benton called River Mart is your best bet for freshies and other provisions. If you want more grocery options beyond the local staples, you should do your shopping in one of the bigger towns you’ll pass through on your way – like Great Falls, which has all the big box stores, if that’s your thing.
Vittles
There’s a clear winner here for put-in morning breakfast burritos, pastries, and coffee, as well as for delicious lunches and tap beers: The Wake Cup, on Front Street. Otherwise Fort Benton has a few meat-and-potato spots, splurgy vittles at the Grand Union Grille, or pizza and bowling at B Social Bar and Lanes.
Floating on the Missouri is a remarkable privilege. Here, you can sleep alongside a river that has hosted and held humans for centuries. You can feel history however it suits you: pairing your river map with Lewis’ and Clark’s journals; sitting with reverence beneath petroglyph panels; burying yourself in geologic time within the labyrinthine slot canyons of the Breaks.