The waters of the Mississippi lap at my kayak. I squint, not wanting the blinking yellow lights of heavy industry north of the Arch to spot out my night vision. I’m disoriented—not quite lost, but definitely not found. I’m trying to keep the shore in sight, but submerged sandbars keep detouring me farther into the river.
Shivering, I recall a cautionary tale, one that’s floated for years among St. Louis’ kayaking community. In 2007, during the Missouri River 340, a grueling 100-hour paddling marathon from Kansas City to St. Charles along the Big Muddy, a kayaking couple—no doubt exhausted, dehydrated, and peering through the darkness—misjudged the distance and speed of an approaching barge and was swept under the massive hull. The couple clawed their way to the side of the boat, where the crew pulled them to safety. Their kayak was shredded like tree bark in the propeller.
The warning seems simple: Don’t paddle the river in the dark.
The day before, as my plane from Detroit came in low, parallel to the river, I got a new perspective on the whitewater undulations at the Chain of Rocks, where I frequently paddle my little orange play boat. A mile downstream from the rapids, the river is shunted away from Chouteau Island by a sandy beach that gives way to a boulder jetty, which itself gave way in two places during the Great Flood of ’93. Now, two sharp breaches are cut into the berm.
From above, my eyes had followed two crinkled ribbons of whitewater pouring through the breaches, which joined in a swirling pool and snaked down into riffled bends between sculpted sand dunes. Framed by the leafless oaks of Chouteau and Mosenthein islands, the chute almost looked like a new river. Those don’t come along very often in these parts.
The plan had come together like most plans: haphazardly. My friend Paul and I had joined a boozy moonlight hike the night before, so we were lazy until noon the next day, when the sun shone white at its apex. It was a winter day in the mid-50s, one that didn’t feel like winter at all. We’d grabbed our boats and gear and caravaned north through the city. I’d spent the morning on Google Maps, poring over satellite images of the chute, profiling take-out spots.
Soon, we parked my truck at the tip of Chouteau Island, where a young couple was picnicking out the back of a rusty truck. The fella, in denim shorts, a white tank top, and a camo ball cap, hopped down from the tailgate and approached for a look. He eyed my paddles.
“Yer not going through Low Water, are you?”
I stared at him blankly for a moment, before asking, “The Chain of Rocks?”
“It’s called Low Water around here,” he said.
We glanced around at the yellow grass, the sharp rocks, the giant red-and-white electrical tower. A half-mile upstream, along the shipping canal that delineates the man-made island and redirects barges around the Chain of Rocks, there’s a lock; the operators are Chouteau Island’s only residents.
“Low Water,” I repeated.
Paul and I walked to the island’s upstream side. Too many times, near the end of a new run, I’ve peered anxiously at the riverbanks, scanning for a trail or the distant outline of tree-obscured cars, realizing that I didn’t get a pretrip visual on the take-out. Here, however, it looked easy enough: Take out on the banks beneath an 80-foot electrical tower’s angular rise.
We glanced only briefly toward the far side of the sandbar, where the chute emerged into the main river near the tip of Mosenthein Island.
We slid our kayaks into the water just downstream from the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, working upstream along the Illinois shore. We paddled halfway toward the New Chain of Rocks Bridge, where Interstate 270 crosses over the river, before pressing into the current, our noses optimistically pointed toward Alaska. We maintained this diagonal angle for most of the ferry, lest we get blown downstream into The Trolls, an imposing series of 10-foot-tall wave trains.
As we paddled, cars slowed to watch. Truckers craned their heads, trying to fathom what the hell we were doing. From above, we probably didn’t appear to be moving at all—we were just floating ovals of orange and blue, figures with windmilling arms wearing red and green. We stood out like the advertisements for nearby riverboat casinos.
By the time we passed the middle pylon, where the old bridge kinks 22 degrees (I imagined some sadistic architect once causing Model Ts to fly off like lemmings), we were doubled down. We softened our angles and aimed for the pylon just past the kink. On the bridge above, walkers gathered at the rails. When you paddle at the Chain of Rocks, for a brief instant, before the viewers get bored from their distant vantage, a kayaker exists somewhere between spectacle and celebrity. Paul and I waved back at two kids as we passed under the bridge.
Bald eagles perched in trees. Vultures circled overhead. Distant fishermen nodded indifferently. Seagulls zipped between midriver perches on exposed bedrock and nipped at the water.
The Chain is surreal. It’s big and powerful, a half-mile wide from shore to shore. The spot is unlike any other place I’ve ever paddled. It feels less like a river than like an inland sea of choppy whitecaps on brown water. I can’t call it pretty, but it’s quite a scene. The rapids spread out at this point in the river, and we played our way from rapid to rapid.
Normally, we spend two hours here, but on this day we eyed the lowering sun and decided to move on after only a half hour.
We turned back toward Illinois and whatever lay beyond.
Most whitewater kayakers—all adventurers—in Missouri eventually learn: If they’re willing to take what they can get, they’ll get as much as they can take.
Paddlers rub their hands raw racing the 340. Cyclists rub their butts raw riding the Katy Trail. Urban kayakers chase storm clouds and call irrigation ditches “creeks” in the name of paddling. We launch off concrete abutments and paddle over sunken washing machines and snagged tires, trying to keep our noses above the sewage-tinged runoff. At a certain river level, the low-water bridge to Howell Island becomes a big wave. In the summer, we’ll paddle a mile up the Meramec River to play in the eddy lines
from a clump of protruding logs—yep, logs.
Little is off-limits in the search for Missouri adventure, and some adventurers occasionally push too far.
Case in point: Last summer, Paul joined a local group that meets for hiking, biking, and flat-water paddling—informal adventures around the region. In August, the group decided to run the Mississippi, from Alton down through the locks to just above the Chain of Rocks. It sounded different, worth a try.
We headed out with our boats and sat under an overpass for two hours while the shuttle was late, the leader didn’t show, gear was forgotten, and lost drivers called for directions.
“The adventure is in the organizing,” I’d muttered to Paul as we pushed off into the river, leaving the others on the boat ramp. A mile downstream from the spindly cable-stay Clark Bridge, we reached the Melvin Price Locks and Dam, just as the sky was darkening. In the distance, a bulbous cloud dragged a curtain of shade in front of the sun.
Paul yanked a chain on the side of the lock.
“Yeah?” the lock operator snapped over a loudspeaker, like we’d banged on his front door, waking him from a nap.
“Um, we’re in boats,” Paul said.
“OK,” the operator grumbled.
We looked at each other. What are we? Door-to-door salesmen?
“We want to go through the lock.”
“Gotta lock a barge through. Gonna be a while.” He hung up.
Off in the distance, a jagged line of brightness flashed from sky to ground. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. Four, one thousand. Five— A booming crack preceded a gust of wind.
Another flash splintered the sky, like a cracked windshield. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. Four—
This was not good.
View Mike Bezemek’s Mississippi River Route in a larger map
We turned toward the shore. Pellets of rain began to strike, the surface of the river whipping up. The rain ricocheted into our faces. By the time we reached the bank, small rivulets were flowing off the levee. Lightning struck a nearby tree. We carried our boats toward a downed tree and leaned them against the trunk, huddling underneath and pulling the cockpits down as the wind tried to rip the boats into the air.
After 15 minutes, the lightning and thunder began to separate into a promising delay. The rain softened. Voices came from the river. We stepped out to look. The adventure group had arrived, eight boats strong, with maybe two experienced paddlers among them. They were mostly dry, having just missed the storm.
Their new leader grinned. “What are you boys hiding from?” he bellowed.
“Another one’s coming,” I said, pointing at the horizon, where a rising nimbus draped an even wider wall of darkness.
The leader’s buddy, decked out in the latest gear—a new boat with a shiny top and a crisp life jacket—held up a bag with his smartphone inside. “Nothing on the radar,” he said.
I pointed emphatically at the sky, where white light flashed, followed by thunder. The wind whipped up again, and rain began to fall. The rest of the group, still in the middle of the river, began to circle, unsure of what to do.
“Get off the river!” we shouted, our cries swallowed by the wind. We moved back under our lean-tos. Lightning struck another tree a few hundred yards in the other direction. My eardrums throbbed. Soaking wet, I shivered from the cool wind. A pair of legs arrived outside our shelter. Then a second pair. The leader and his smartphone accomplice squeezed in with us. Through the space between boats, I saw that the rest of the group had stayed in their boats, pressed up against the lock’s cement wall.
The storm finally passed 15 minutes later. The sun peeked out, and so did we.
“I’m done,” I said. I dragged my boat to the river, intent on paddling back up along the shore.
The leader and his motley team of soaked boaters conferred before deciding to trek onward. As the group waited to be locked through, Paul and I paddled upstream. Another wave of storms crept across the horizon.
We never heard the full story. But a week later, Paul read a haughty, cryptic comment online, in which the writer bragged about surviving the violent downdraft of a microburst. The report described a swamped boat being blown far upstream sans paddler. The gossip indicated that the paddlers finished sometime after 11 p.m.
At first, everything was fine as we made our way from the Chain of Rocks.
As we approached the first breach, I paddled in front of Paul, keeping enough distance to peel downstream if the opening wasn’t clear. Finally, I plunged through the rocky gates onto a long wave train. I skirted into an eddy and surfed back into the current on the front of a wave. Paul barreled through the breach.
After a few minutes, we floated into a swirling pool. We let our boats spin in the current before angling for the opening in the sand. High up on the banks of Chouteau Island was an old clapboard cabin, sagging to one side.
The channel was narrow and shallow, in some places only a foot deep. With only a few momentary perches, we passed beyond the shallow riffles into deeper runs and pools. There was no whitewater—the fast, sinuous course I thought I saw from the plane earlier that day was eerily absent. Only a quarter-mile into the chute, we found ourselves trapped in a tiny channel.
“Where’s all the water?” Paul asked as his boat lurched to a halt, centered on a sandbar.
While Paul dragged his boat around the berm, I climbed onto a sand dune. Upstream, water poured through the breaches. How was this tiny stream the result? It must flow into the sand, I decided, dragging my boat across a beach.
On the horizon, the sun inched below the buildings downtown. With the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge in the distance, our electrical-tower landmark had to be close. “I guess we’re almost there,” I said, hopping back into my boat and paddling through a deepening pool.
It turned out that we weren’t even close—though we didn’t realize it until a half-mile downriver, as the deep blue of dusk changed to black stained orange by the lights of industrial north St. Louis.
The chute again went from a deep pool to a shallow riffle. My hands were frozen from plunging them into the ice-cold water and pushing off the bottom. I warmed them inside my paddle mittens. Paul said his feet were starting to tingle. The temperature was quickly dropping.
Peering downriver, I could make out the faintest trace of our landmark: The sharp outline of the tower loomed against the night sky, a blinking red light on top. “It’s right there,” I blurted, hoisting my boat onto my shoulder and stomping across the water-sculpted dunes. Paul, who was farther out in the pool, kept paddling.
The dune rose a few feet before dipping into a small lake, which I navigated around. I kept one eye on the rising tower and another on the murky shape of Paul, who followed the channel toward Mosenthein Island. I walked up to a hidden side channel that seemed to come from Chouteau Island, forcing me west along its perimeter and back to the edge of the chute, just as Paul arrived.
“Well, that worked,” I said, getting back into my boat.
“Is that the tower?” Paul pointed skyward. “Or is that?”
My eyes followed his panning index finger: Now, there were two towers. The first, the one we’d been watching for the past 30 minutes, clearly was not our goal—it was smack dab in the middle of Chouteau Island. The second tower was farther downstream—but was it at the tip?
“Is that a third tower?” I asked. It was. It could have been our destination—or on the Missouri side of the river.
I shivered, and Paul did the same, catching the chill like a yawn. But both of us were wide awake, our eyes open like raccoons caught in high beams.
“We better paddle,” I said.
I normally roll my eyes at risk-seeking outdoor sports enthusiasts.
Several nights before, Paul and I had arrived at a trailhead in St. Charles County to join a crowd of well-heeled hikers with fanny packs, ultralight hiking poles, balaclavas, and breathable nylon rain pants. (There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.) Were we hiking 3 miles to the Missouri River bluffs or making a summit push on K2? After that first hike, I’d told Paul, “I’m never coming back.”
Yet there I was for a second moonlight hike with the group.
A small cluster of the inner circle called out for the scattered crowd to assemble. The organization was about to begin, with all of the rules the leaders had no intention of following: Stay on the trail. Watch for low-hanging branches. Keep an even pace, and don’t drop behind…
Finally, we were off.
The lead and sweep hikers pulled out walkie-talkies, as if unloading a freight train. We trudged through the forest to a melody of squelches. A guy in a do-rag ran alongside the hikers. His toes caught an exposed root, and he pitched forward, bumping into an attractive woman. He caught himself and puffed out his chest. He darted in front of her, holding back a chest-high sapling for her and releasing it afterward to slap the next hiker in line.
I stepped off the trail and bent over. A big burly man in a large poncho with a wooden staff approached like a comic-convention wizard. “Everything all right?” I imagined him adding the words my young apprentice to his question.
They meant well. I was an outdoor guide in the Sierra Nevadas for six years, so I know that it’s all about safety. Imagine if someone got hurt: cut a hand on a sapling, twisted a knee on a tree trunk. “Thank you, sir,” I replied to one leader who swung a flashlight like a cop directing traffic, so we could continue on the clearly marked trail.
Finally, we reached the Missouri River. There was a huge bonfire, an engulfed 10-foot-tall tepee of driftwood. People pulled out beers and settled in for what appeared to be a good ol’ time along the banks of the river. The moon shone over the spear-tipped trees of Howell Island. Someone lit a candle on a foshee, a miniature homemade hot-air balloon that filled with warmth and floated into the sky like a Japanese lantern.
As the night wore on, the propped logs of the bonfire collapsed with a big woof, and the crowd cheered. The Wizard began pushing down logs with his staff until the fire looked like a simmering frying pan of glowing embers and dark logs. One man stepped out into the fire, walking from log to log. The Wizard tossed his cape-cum-poncho onto a rock and followed suit. Do-Rag raced through the flames, beckoning for the young woman to join him. When she hedged, the rest of the crowd cheered her on. Grasping hands, Do-Rag walked her across a cooler part of the fire. The first firewalker made another run. This time, a log slipped, and his foot plowed into the embers. He yelped before lowering his voice and chortling.
As the hikers walked across the fire, tread melted off $300 boots. Nylon pants sizzled. Fanny packs steamed as hikers stepped off the fire.
I sat and watched the mayhem, spotting two 11-year-old boys at the edge of the fire, debating whether it was wise to proceed.
In the darkness of the Mosenthein Chute, a shiver runs up my spine. The moon has risen, and the sand glows white. After following the channel along Mosenthein Island—knowing the chute would soon merge into the Mississippi—we move back toward shore. But we keep beaching on underwater sand berms. My paddle sticks down into muck again. I push off further out into the eddy, closer to where the current of the river silently, and swiftly, moves. I squint.
Where’s Paul?
My vision has been fading for the past few minutes, as the various light sources splotch across my eyes. There are white sparkles on the inky water. Yellow lights blink on and off. Gauging distance is impossible. Cranes and docks seem only feet away, but must be half a mile.
Without warning, a barge silently whistles through the water in front of me. It sounds like a washing machine behind a linen-closet door. It’s so quiet. So close. I think I can touch it. My heart is racing. The wake reaches me, and my boat rocks up and down.
We are no different from the adventure group. I cringe.
“Paul!” I shout.
Nothing.
The barge plows past. The rumble of the engine arrives. The wake becomes choppy. I point my boat into the rising waves until they dissipate.
“Paul!” I shout again.
From a hundred feet away, toward the shore, comes a single word: “Yeah?”
“Wait there. I’m going to check our location on the map.”
I paddle up to Paul, beach my boat, and stand on the cold sand. I retrieve my smartphone from my dry bag and load a map program. It places us in the exact middle of the Mississippi River, 200 yards northwest of the tip of Chouteau Island. We look southeast and see the faint outline of the tower.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
We hoist our boats and hike across the dunes, over a small rise, down into a depression, and up onto the bank. We practically run underneath the electrical tower toward my truck.
Paul is shivering uncontrollably. My hands are frozen. I fumble with the keys to the truck. We change, stow our gear. Soon, we’re driving north along the levee with the heat cranked. After several miles, we reach a locked gate blocking the levee road. I throw the truck into four-wheel drive and take us across the sloped side of the levee—we are getting out of here.
On the other side, a cop is waiting.
I roll down the window and tell him our story.
“That’s quite a night,” he says, chuckling. “Been thinking of trying it out myself.”
