Missouri River Speed Record

09/03/2026

Duffus here: Yesterday I went from the downstream side of Oahe Dam to Ponca State Park. As I have gotten in the more eastern part of South Dakota there are a lot more road options to choose from! I switched from Google Maps to the old Gazetteer method of navigating that served us well before smart phones were a thing. This gives me an insight: Google Maps are best if you are interested in the destination- they give you a route, how long it will take to get there and where to turn. But if you are interested in the journey, gazetteers give you a myriad of road options! I found a great gravel road that went right along the shore for almost half of Big Bend. I found a questionable gravel “trail” that went along the edge of the high bank on the river right side of the river. I am certain Google Maps would not have routed me down either road!

There is a lot of change as the Missouri moves toward the intersection of South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska. It's almost as though you can see the change from arid West to the moist East in a few miles. When I stayed at Ponca State Park in the loess hills west of west of Sioux City, it certainly did not have the feel of a western park!

09/02/2026

Scott Miller here: Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders is an extraordinary human! He and his wonderful wife hosted my team in his home near Memphis when we were training for the Mississippi record, multiple times. The film
about his 2nd Guinness world record setting trip down the Mississippi is so good I was inspired to contact Wilderness Mindset, and they ended up making a documentary about our trip down the river and are currently making one about our trip down the Missouri. I’ve been following his latest adventure in the Appalachian trail and am so inspired and happy about his latest accomplishment. He’s getting a ton of great press, as he should be!

This week, Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders became the oldest person to complete the roughly 2,190-mile trail.

09/02/2026

Duffus here: I decided to separate the Lake Oahe section from yesterday’s drive because I have so many different thoughts. From Lake Sakakawea I was driving mostly north/south and most of the time in a wind similar to the biggest one we experienced on Lake Oahe (25 mph with gusts to 35 mph). Even without a canoe on top of the van it was difficult to manage! The truth is we were really lucky with regard to wind. We were probably on shore twice on account of wind, and the total time (which was put to good use sleeping) was probably less than 24 hours. I was imagining days on shore because of the wind!

Oahe, Like Sakakawea is down about 27 feet from maximum pool, but that means the shallow upper reaches are almost completely without water, the river braids and flows for miles into what would normally be lake! The Western Flyer was planning to put in at a ramp downstream and then make it as far upstream as they could. That was quite a ways down stream because the upper lake was so shallow. I started to think white stranded logs in the distance must be them, like “that must be the Western Flyer,” so this happened enough that random white logs in the distance became “Western Flyers…” That just might be permanent for random fresh cottonwood logs in the distance!

Last night I camped at the Oahe Downstream Recreation area where the support stayed while we were on Oahe. I came late and left early, but on the way out I met Sally. She saw the MRSR logo on the van. She told me the Missouri River Speed Record was a highlight of their summer.That brought me joy!

09/01/2026

By the time we got to Lake Sakakawea, we were 8 days in. We were exhausted, lacking for sleep, mentally spongy, and with over 1,500 miles to go, my prevailing thought was that we might not be able to accomplish this record!

Lada would eventually call Lake Sakakawea “The Reservoir That Shall Not Be Named.” I think that was a reference to its seemingly endless loops, and our continuing struggle to efficiently move the boat. Still, this was the one reservoir that I had familiarity with. In 1979 I spent the summer as the park naturalist at Lewis and Clark State Park, my future wife Kathy was the naturalist at Fort Stevenson State Park on the other end of the lake, 130 miles away, so I knew the territory between them quite well. I spent the night again in the campground where I lived in a surplus disaster trailer during the summer of 1979.

So much has changed from when I was here 47 years ago! From a standpoint of paddling, the water was 21 feet lower than it was back then. In 1979, I set my Minolta SLR camera on a rock near the water’s edge and set the self timer for a photo that would be our engagement announcement, she posts it on our anniversary almost every year, so this is the Lake Sakakawea I remember. Right now the bay is almost dry! An extended drought and low snow packs in recent years are certainly to blame. Back then there was an oil boom, related to the 1979 oil crisis, but it was nothing like the boom of more recent years. There are oil rigs often in clusters of 10 or more and you can usually see a half dozen well sites in a single field of vision.

I drove by the place just upstream from New Town where we waited out a lightning storm for a few hours in the Western Flyer and Mobetta. On the hill pretty much right above us there was a cluster of at least 25 oil wells.

Still, as reservoirs go, Sakakawea was my favorite. Part of that is related to long connection, but plenty is also its flare, and that's more than the gas flares that lit up the hillsides at night like so many huge candles. It was also the color, black coal, red scoria, ochre badlands, and those incredible petrified wood stumps that weathered out of the coal that the low water had exposed!

08/31/2026

Duffus here, today I drove across the Fort Peck Reservation. By some accounts it is rough territory, but that is not at all what we found! This was one of the more magical sections we paddled through. There were the campfires and quiet acknowledgements as we pasted by at night. There were the two guys matching our speed riding bare back, we paddled over and exchanged stories about why we were there. There were people at the landings, people on the bridges, people just along the shore, waving and cheering as we went by. What made this all the more remarkable was that it was often in places that seemed remote. They had heard about us and came out to see.

We past this little church on a hillside above the river. The sun was starting to get low in the sky, it was the only church I remember seeing on the entire river. I made a note in my mind roughly where it was located. Today I saw it in the distance, and with considerable effort found the road that eventually got me there. I wanted to find out at least some of its story. When I got there there were a couple pickups in the parking lot, and kids on the swing set. I found a couple older men in the Sunday School building, they said they were waiting for the church service at 10:00, we talked. They had heard about the Missouri River Speed Record. I told them I was a retired pastor, I was afraid I wasn't dressed appropritately in my shorts and MRSR tee shirt, but I asked If I could attend the service. Half of the hymn were in Dakota, the person leading worship wore shorts and a tee shirt, I felt welcome.

Makaicu Presbyterian Church was founded in 1902. 12 years after Wounded Knee, almost as old as the last congregation I served in Iowa.

08/30/2026

Duffus here, today I have been thinking about perspective. It takes quite a bit of time to drive from Fort Benton to Fort Peck, especially if you want to see the river as often as you can! If you are on the river it's easy to imagine that you are in some remote location and in some ways it is. Driving the roads, the presence of farms and ranches, and missile silos harboring intercontinental ballistic missiles unmistakably show that we weren't all that far from "civilization." Still, its beautiful country, both from the river and from the roads, it's just different.

I thought long and hard about whether or not to drive down to Judith Landing on the road that gave us so much trouble in 2025, but the perspective was different, it was dry today. I think about the unsung challenges of the support crew. I know the road to Judith Landing was wetter for them than it was in 2025. I think of the Western Flyer, and the Mobette navigating the steep grades between reservoirs probably to find ramps that were almost impossible to launch from. I think of seeing the photo of Scooter covered with mud getting out of UL Bend and I don't even know that story. I think of the support crew preparing food probably at difficult times and in difficult circumstances. I think of them trying to fit everything into a subaru, and then trying to find a place to rendezvous with us when it was probably not all that certain how long it would take to get there.

So, my perspective turns to gratitude. For all the people who were a part of this. Today, that’s what I have been remembering most.

08/29/2026

Duffus here, I finally made it out to Montana to retrieve my van. Because I am officially retired I decided not to go directly home, instead I am following the Missouri. There is something about paddling a long river- sometimes quiet and serene; sometimes turbulent and angry that makes it almost like family...like if you are in the neighborhood and it's not inconvenient it might be good to pay a visit. So that's my plan, Lada asked how much of the river I was planning to follow, I said I don't know? Maybe all of it, after all. plenty of the human family I acquired during this endeavor are far downstream from here, maybe some of them will be around as well...

Today I went from three forks to Fort Benton, that took us about 4 days to paddle. The water is lower than it was in June, the original rock of Black Eagle Falls in Great Falls is almost all out of the water, I heard, for the first time in 100 years. It seems a little sad, but it is still flowing. In one short day of travel I have made it out of the mountains and unto the high plains.

08/22/2026

Scott Miller here:

Here is part four of four of the story I wrote about a specific story incident from our recent record-setting journey down the 2,341 miles of the Missouri River.

Thank you to everyone who has offered feedback, encouragement, and shared stories so far!

I am going to put the first three parts in the comments in case anyone wants to read them.

Part four

I had spent the previous two years planning the trip and so had Scott Duffus. Both of us obsessed over a thousand details, but he often thought about different details than I did; things that would never even occur to me.

One day he told me that he thought each of us should have an emergency bivy sack and a set of warm clothes sealed in dry bags, secured in the canoe at all times. His reasoning: suppose we got separated from the support boats somewhere remote. Suppose the weather turned ugly. Suppose we had to spend a night on shore. He also designed and sewed a custom canoe shelter that could be deployed in just such a situation.

I remember thinking it all sounded a little unlikely, but I also thought that it couldn’t hurt.

Now, I thought, thank God for Scott’s prescience and skill.

I had no idea what kind of rocks the thousands of shards all around us were, but the word “chert” came to mind and I liked the sound of it. I started happily calling it chert until Duffus corrected me: “it’s SHALE!” he said, with a tone of exasperation at this thousandth example of my general ignorance. Not for the first time I wondered how Duffus seemed to know at least something about just about everything.

It was time to deploy Duffus’ canoe shelter for the first time. He told us it was designed to attach to the canoe, and the canoe should be propped on its side.
Some combination of wind and water had created a beautiful 3 foot tall, contoured slope in the shale-y mud (muddy shale?). Perfect. We tilted the boat against the mini cliff but the angle was a little too shallow. Curt started scooping shale. Lada and I joined him to form a shale-clearing between-the-legs bucket brigade sans buckets. It was fun to do a job that wasn’t paddling in huge, scary waves. I’ve never outgrown my childhood love of simple manual labor; this was a task I’d most recently done when moving sand to bury my nephews on a beach. (I buried everything except their heads, with their consent, and they loved it. I feel compelled to clarify.)

We quickly moved thousands of shale shards, carving a shallow trench the length of the canoe.

The storm clouds moved closer, and gusts of wind started harassing our hitherto sanctuary of calm.

We propped the canoe up again, with one side on the ground, the bottom of the canoe against the slope and the other side of the canoe creating a narrow roof of sorts. It seemed perfect.

Scott reached into a dry bag and produced the shelter tarp, which none of the rest of us had ever seen before, like a magician pulling a scarf from his sleeve.

Within seconds he'd snapped it to the canoe, stretched it down toward the ground, and anchored the edges with rocks.

Just like that we had a shelter.

It would keep the rain off. We could sit inside the part of the canoe on the ground and, Scott explained, stick our heads underneath the “roof” for extra protection. Scott Duffus: sorcerer.

We scampered under the tarp, eager to try it out. It was cramped, and, in order to actually get our heads protected required some unpleasant bending, but it seemed like it would work. “It should protect us even if it hails”, Scott said.

Just then a fresh blast of wind lifted and flung a few dozen shale bullets against the topmost part of the canoe (where it extended just above the mini-cliff), right behind our heads and our heads sustained no damage at all. It was immediate proof of concept; we were protected from hailstorm and shalestorm alike.

Better yet, after a few more shale pepperings the storm moved on without a single drop of rain; a glancing blow.

At last we climbed into warm clothes and Lada, Curt and I crawled into our bivy sacks. Duffus was still up moving around and getting things organized.

The adrenaline began to wear off. I was enormously pleased. We’d just been dealt the most significant challenge of the trip thus far and we’d come through it beautifully. Years of preparation and practice had paid off. We had a long way to go to achieve our goal, but I felt we'd passed an important test.

Just as I was beginning to nod off, a final gust of wind picked up Duffus' bivvy sack and jacket...and sent both sailing into the darkness, into the water, out of sight.

08/20/2026

Scott Miller here: I recently was interviewed about the trip on “Live Under the Big Sky” on radio station KLTZ out of Glasgow, Montana.

Thanks for a great discussion Max and Hayley!

https://soundcloud.com/kltz-glasgow/lubs-august-11-2026?si=20abafa99d284add95861c36bf13c082&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

08/14/2026

Scott Miller here:

Here is part three of the story I wrote about a specific story incident from our recent record-setting journey down the 2,341 miles of the Missouri River.

Thank you to everyone who has offered feedback, encouragement, and shared stories so far!

Part three

The far shore was a mile away. We were traveling at what felt like sixty miles an hour (actually only about six miles per hour). If there is a good way to bring a canoe to shore in six foot waves, none of us knew what it was. We'd practiced surf landings in two-foot waves that spring, and they'd gone badly. We leapt out ten feet from shore, got soaked, watched the canoe get battered and filled with water, and narrowly avoided having our ankles crushed. These waves were three times as big.
We had about ten minutes before we reached the shore. I looked down at the map on the tablet.

And there they were.

Two little bays, curling back toward the southeast. The only satchels of safety along an otherwise straight-line shore. And the best part was we just happened to be on track to run into the smaller one on the right.

I desperately hoped we could maintain our course and that the bay was big enough—and deep enough—to catch us.

I glanced left. Scott Mansker was at the helm of the support boat Western Flyer, his head sticking out the little cockpit window.

Our eyes met.

Our eyes met with that peculiar mixture of fear, excitement, and respect that only seems to exist when everyone knows things have become genuinely dangerous. "We're heading for a little hidey-hole!" I yelled. "We're outta here!" he shouted back.

The words themselves weren't remarkable. His tone was. Somehow, in those three words, he communicated that the conditions had crossed a line. They weren't just dangerous for us anymore; they were dangerous for the support boats too.

Good-bye support boats…now it’s every boat for itself.

The forces on my paddle shaft were immense. I braced it against the gunwale and it seemed there was a million pounds concentrated in the ½ inch of contact. It’s an astonishingly light bent- shaft carbon-fiber paddle designed to optimize the forward power stroke. But now I needed the paddle to be a giant rudder and I had to wrench much harder on it than if I had a straight paddle.

I prayed it wouldn't break. For a moment I considered cushioning the shaft with my hand or forearm. Then I pictured a broken finger or at least a spectacular bruise and decided against it.

The wind was now blowing the tops off the waves and creating thousands of tiny waves dotting the surface of every regular wave. The wind was running over the waves and the sun glinted off every wave big and small; a million dazzling flashes of light in all directions. For several hours the waves had dominated my consciousness, and now, at their most menacing, they were also at their most beautiful. And yet something else had claimed my attention: the wind.

It was astonishingly powerful and maddeningly inconsistent.

Every gust demanded another adjustment to the angle of the paddle. Every adjustment had to happen immediately. At first it was just a matter of prying the blade further away from the canoe or drawing it back in. But the wind became more erratic and I had to bring my paddle from the left side of the boat to the right. For the second or two it took to lift the paddle over the canoe we’d be completely at the mercy of the wind. I never switched sides so fast in my life.

Sometimes I could hold an angle for as long as five seconds at a time, but never more. Every so often, the wind and waves would line up perfectly and for a few glorious seconds I didn’t need to apply any force to the blade at all. Then the wind would change its mind again.
I yelled my plan forward to my teammates; “I’m headed towards a little bay!”. Scott Duffus was paddling hard in front of me. "I hope your bay has water in it!" he shouted. So did I. The water levels in the lake were low and some bays were dry; the support boats had been unable to get to some marinas. But when the fire is about to consume you, you can’t worry about whether the firemen’s trampoline will hold. You just have to jump.

We drew closer and closer and the little bay appeared.

The big waves spat us into the mouth of the bay with a violent shove.

We kept paddling as the waves slowly receded in size. We curved behind a rocky ridge.

The waves shrank further.

The screaming metered down to a howl.

Then a roar.

Then almost nothing. No more wind, and no more waves.

Everyone stopped paddling, and sat in silence.
It seemed the only thing still moving was my body, vibrating with a hitherto unnoticed steady thrum.

The adventure quotient had dropped down to about a 1.

We gathered ourselves and slowly paddled to the very back of the bay, where there was no sign of the tempest raging just around the corner. We pulled over and stepped onto a shore consisting of millions of flat shards of rock resting on a foundation of deep, sticky mud. The sun was setting in spectacular fashion. We were profoundly sleep deprived and suddenly I could feel the bone deep fatigue. And then I noticed something else.

Dark storm clouds, streaked with lightning, close and getting closer.