Source of the Missouri River

I've lived within a mile or two of the Missouri River just about my entire life.  I've camped on its banks, dinner-cruised it, rafted it, and crossed over it thousands of times.  I've seen it lazy and slow, like a mud flow.  I've seen it choked with jumbled ice disks, piling up against bridge abutments.  I've seen it angry and flood-swollen well beyond its banks.  I've seen it placid and dangerous.  It's been a fixture in my life, often out of sight, but always near.  It's like a friend, or maybe more like a brother, where the bond has deeper roots.

I've been retired for five years now, and have really enjoyed not traveling like I did when I was working.  Staying home and working in the shop or garage is pretty much what I've wanted to do since I gave up gainful employment.  Recently, though, I've been feeling a little itch.  I don't know exactly when or how the idea started, but for at least a few years, I've had this notion of a small adventure connected with the river.  As the idea evolved and matured, it took on the tone of an exploration more than just a trip.

So, on Monday morning, I'm leaving on a road trip, generally following the Missouri upstream to its ultimate source.

The true "Ultimate Source" of the Missouri is not a secret, though it wasn't discovered until nearly a century after Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri.  Lewis and Clark's original declaration of the Missouri source was incorrect.  The true source is apparently an isolated spring high in the Centennial mountains of southern Montana.  The spring is named for explorer Jacob Brower, who discovered it, but neither the location nor the name shows up on any USGS or State maps I could find.  Though people have been there and written about it, it apparently isn't accessible by car, and is reportedly not marked with any sort of signage.



Sunday, August 12, 2018

The Missouri is the longest river in North America.  Though some geography books teach that the Missouri starts at Three Forks, Montana, this is not really correct.  When Lewis and Clark explored up the Missouri, they had the authority and responsibility to name many of the tributaries joining the river.  In many cases, they would use the name the local inhabitants used, or some variant of it.  But they followed the convention that the main river's name would continue with the longest branch.  At Three Forks, however, they rejected convention, and gave each of the three joining streams a new name--the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin, after the then current US President, and the Secretaries of State and Treasury, respectively.  Now, maybe this was because they simply didn't know which of the three streams was the longest, and maybe it was just brown-nosing their bosses.

A similar thing can be said about the confluence of the Missouri with the Mississippi.  Had the naming followed convention, the Missouri name would continue to the Gulf of Mexico.  For this reason, the Missouri River System, extending as a single continuous stream from the Rocky Mountain spring to the Mississippi Delta, is the fourth longest river in the world, behind the Amazon, the Nile, and the Yangtze.

Below, from left to right--The Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, near downtown Omaha;  view from the bridge looking north;  the Mormon bridge north of Omaha, near the site of a ferry that the Mormons used in their migration of 1846.  Pics are clickable.






Monday, August 13

Any river can cause damage when it floods, but one the size of the Missouri can cause catastrophic mayhem.  The average elevation change of the river through the Great Plains is only about a foot per mile, so it tends to be slow and to meander a lot.  This creates a very wide flood plain and braided, shifting channels.  For this reason, the US Army Corps of Engineers was assigned the task of minimizing flooding.  They do this by damming the river to allow more consistent flows, and channelizing it so that it has more defined and stable banks.  The state of South Dakota alone has four major dams on the Missouri.  From south to north: Gavins Point Dam, Fort Randall Dam, Big Bend Dam, and the massive Oahe Dam. 

To preserve some notion of how the river looked historically, the Corps has set aside two stretches of the river in South Dakota, each of a few dozen miles, with no damming, and no channelization, and no other tinkering.  It is strikingly obvious when looking at a map of the river how different it looks in these areas.  The river is wider, with many islands and braided channels.  

This is a picture of Mulberry Bend in one of the hands-off areas near Yankton, SD.




This is the spillway of the Fort Randall Dam.  The dam backed up the river for over 100 miles, forming Lake Francis Case.





A view of the river from a bluff near Chamberlain, SD





Tuesday, August 14

The river is getting noticeably smaller as I go upstream, and the flood plain is narrower.  The river cuts through more limestone up here, rather than the softer, loess type deposits farther south.

Here is what the river looks like just out of Bismarck, ND:




And another 50 miles upstream at Washburn.




The largest dam on the Missouri, at least in terms of storage is the Garrison dam in North Dakota.  Lake Sakakawea behind the dam stores nearly 24 million acre-feet of water (almost seven cubic miles).  I paralleled the lake today for nearly 180 miles.

For such a large lake, its output stream is pretty modest.





Wednesday, August 15

Going upstream after leaving Nebraska, the Missouri cuts South Dakota in half vertically, thrusts into the belly of North Dakota past Bismarck, then starts a wide arc to the West into Montana.  It comes within about 90 miles of the Canadian border before falling south through Great Falls and Helena.  This is of course backwards from the way the river's water actually flows, but as upstream explorers, it's probably the way Lewis and Clark thought of it, though they obviously wouldn't have known about the modern place names.

Coming into Montana, the river has cut canyons in many places.  This is near Culbertson just across the border.  The river is noticeably smaller.  The good-sized Yellowstone river joins the Missouri just a few miles downstream from here




Other places are flatter with wide flood plains.  This is near Wolf Point, MT.  The Wolf Point Bridge is an abandoned 1930s structure that is maintained as a classic example of its design.




Near Fort Benton, MT, the river has cut a very wide canyon. 




Between Wolf Point and Fort Benton, the Fort Peck dam stores the Missouri's water in the 130-mile long Fort Peck Lake.  It is pretty remote, and most of the lake shore is difficult to access by road.  Skirting around the lake took me within about 40 miles of Canada.

This is the river near Craig, MT, between Great Falls and Helena.  It's looking a little more like a mountain stream now.




Thursday, August 16

It isn't easy to imagine how isolated these areas were when they were first explored.  What I've traced in a few days took Lewis and Clark over a year to discover.  The inspiring thing is that there are some places that surely look essentially the same today as they did then.

This is the Missouri a little downstream from present day Townsend, Montana.





Ask 100 people where the source of the Missouri River is, and the second most common answer will probably be "Three Forks, Montana".   (The most common answer would likely be "I don't know").  I think it's what I was taught in school.  Though it isn't the source of the river, it is historically notable, and it is the place where the name Missouri is retired.  Three rivers--the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin come together here to form the Missouri.  The actual confluence is sort of spread out in a broad valley, so it's a little hard to sort out from ground level.  The third picture below is the combined Jefferson and Madison before the Gallatin joins them.




We know today that the ultimate source of the Missouri is up the Jefferson River.  The first pic below is the Jefferson about 50 miles upstream from Three Forks.  The river is popular with floaters.  I found the sign sort of funny.





The Jefferson River has its own Three Forks near where the above picture was taken.  The Beaverhead River, the Big Hole River, and the Ruby River join to form the Jefferson.  The Beaverhead leads to the source.  This is the Beaverhead as it pass through the town of Twin Bridges, Montana.




The Beaverhead runs for about 50 miles.  It is fed from the Clark Canyon Reservoir.  The largest stream feeding the reservoir is the Red Rock River, which is shown below about another 50 miles upstream.




This is about as far as I'm able to go upstream with the gear that I have with me.  The roads have gotten pretty bad, and it's about as far as they go anyway.  The Red Rock picture above took a bit of a hike off the road.  I do know that the Red Rock River is fed by the coolly named Hell Roaring Creek, and the creek is fed directly from the source spring.  I knew all along that I wouldn't be able to get to the spring this way, so my plan is to access the spring from the other direction.  This will take about a hundred mile detour around the essentially roadless wilderness that holds the spring.


Friday, August 17

I was only able to get within about 30 miles (as the crow flies) of the spring by the upstream route.  It would have been a several day pack trip that I didn't sign up for.  This was anticipated though, so I had a Phase II plan to access the spring from the east.  The closest road east of the spring is the Sawtell Peak road.  It is a narrow, scary, 15-mile gravel road that serves a weather radar installation on the mountain peak.

The Sawtell road is in Idaho, and Hell Roaring Creek Canyon is in Montana.  The Montana-Idaho border in this area is the also Continental Divide, and this is a place where the Divide curls back on itself, so that locally, Idaho is east of Montana, and the east side of the Divide drains to the Pacific Ocean, while the west side drains to the Missouri and the Gulf.




The area is fairly rugged, but doable without any special mountain equipment.




The USGS map shows what appears to be a road coming off the Sawtell Peak Road, and I had planned to just drive that road if possible.  I'm driving a four wheel drive truck, but it isn't really designed for serious off-road use.  Well, that "road" is no more than a narrow hiking trail.  No way a normal sized vehicle could negotiate it.  The map also shows a "Jeep Trail".   This is a laugh, too.  So, it was all on foot from the Sawtell Road.  The trailhead was marked, but made no mention of the spring.

I didn't have any trouble following the main trail, but the "Jeep Trail" was pretty faint in places.  The terrain was up and down a lot, with scattered trees and some open areas.




According to the GPS gizmo I had with me, this was the Continental Divide.  Rain falling on the left (West) side of the picture would go to Hell Roaring Creek and to the Missouri.




The spring is not on the trail, so I had to use GPS to help me navigate off the trail.  I got to the area where the spring should be, and I didn't see anything.  I wandered around some, going up a few dry washes without finding anything.  After about an hour of this, I was ready to give up and assume the spring was dry.  As a last resort, I decided to go a little further down the canyon from the GPS location.  Then I saw it.



I had completely forgotten about the cairn marking the spring, but I had seen it in pictures, so I recognized it immediately.  The actual spring is about 20 yards behind the cairn, and nestled down in the rocks, so it isn't visible from this location. 

Scrambling down the rocks, I saw a little grotto with a tiny pool at the base.




This is a little down stream, looking back up at the spring.




So this is Hell Roaring Creek, Mother of the Mighty Missouri.




After sitting a while at the spring, it was time to go.  It was still early, but if I got lost going back, I wanted plenty of time to get found.

I stopped by the cairn to look for the message box.  It was right on top.  It contained missives from previous visitors.  I added mine and replaced the box.




Almost forgot the proof shot.




After about three hours of hiking time and another hour up and down the mountain, I was hot, tired, and hungry.  This was just a little serendipity I saw as I came to the main highway.  Ain't civilization great?




I only saw a few other hikers on the main trail, apparently locals.  I asked them if they were going to Brower's Spring, but none of them seemed to know anything about it.  I saw no one on the trail that went toward the spring, and, other than the message box and the faint trail, not much evidence that anyone had been there.  This is a little puzzling to me.  On the other hand, I think it's good to maintain a few secret places here and there.  I just hope that in 20 years, there isn't a gift shop at Brower's Spring.