Skipping Rocks

9/17/23

Missoula, MT

Today marks the fourth day in a row we’ve gone for a dip in a natural body of water (if you count Diablo Lake, a reservoir in Cascades National Park). This time it was in the Clark Fork outside Alberton, MT. The water’s always cold, at least to a fair-weather fan, but some places are colder than others.

The best time to get in, in my opinion, is sometime between 12 and 2pm, when the day’s the hottest. And, despite the cold water, the experience of drying off is always worth it.

While drying off, I began playing with the rocks next to me, noticing how much better they were for skipping than those at the man-made swimming holes of reservoirs or boat launches, or even Flathead river, surprisingly. I’ve been working on my rock skipping ability, for no other reason than to be good at it. I was sitting next to a small stream on the side of the larger river, and I tried to skip all the way to the other side, perhaps 30 feet. I wondered if, in my announcing a long term, multi-state road trip to friends and family, I had given the assumption that I would be going on grand adventures every day. While, in reality, I would probably be spending a lot of time throwing rocks into a river.