Paddle Back in Time on the Jefferson River
Basic wilderness skills everyone should know
- Location: 2 McKeown Lane, Cardwell, MT, USA (View on Google Maps)
- Start Date: September 23, 2025
- End Date: October 2, 2025
- Start Time: 9:00 am
Dip your paddle into the river and drift back in time as we canoe, camp, and craft our way down Montana’s scenic Jefferson River. This expedition emphasizes basic wilderness skills everyone should know. We’ll leave matches and lighters behind and create fire from the resources at hand, gathering cottonwood roots from driftwood piles for friction fires. Expedition leader Thomas J. Elpel will share many of the skills taught in his book Participating in Nature: Wilderness Survival and Primitive Living Skills. We’ll make discoidal stone knives, craft split willow deer, forage for wild foods, and weave cattail visors for sun protection.
Tom will also introduce basic plant identification skills using his best-selling book Botany in a Day, The Patterns Method of Plant Identification and the Shanleya’s Quest Patterns in Plants Card Game. Learn the essential patterns to identify 45,000 species of plants to the correct families as taught in the video tutorial and put those skills to use botanizing and foraging on the river.
Learn introductory canoeing skills, paddling strokes, and how to pack and balance your gear. The Jefferson is a Class I river for beginning paddlers, with the added challenge of navigating through or around diversion dams. We’ll gather grass and make grass ropes for games of tug-o-war and jump rope, as well as more practical applications, such as tying your canoe securely to the riverbank.
Our route follows the Jefferson River Canoe Trail, retracing by water an essential segment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark Expedition towed dugout canoes up the Jefferson in search of a navigable water route to the Pacific. We’ll follow their path in reverse, floating with the current while connecting with the history of the Corps of Discovery. We’ll take a full week to explore the 80-mile length of the Jefferson River before it meets up with the Madison and Gallatin rivers to form the Missouri.
For more information:
https://greenuniversity.com/Class_Schedule/Paddle_Back_In_Time.htm
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