I Went Rafting With a Jam Band. It Was Better Than It Sounds.

The text landed like a cocktail of escapist passions stirred into one glorious, limestone-dusted glass.

“Raft trip though epic canyons with ripping acoustic Dead cover band Sept. 6-9??” 

Um … HELL YES? And so, with 25 other Deadheads (that’s Grateful Dead fanatics, for the youths) a team of guides, and our personal acoustic trio, Pickin’ on the Dead, I set off on the Green River for the four-day run through Dinosaur National Monument. The rafting trip is part of the RiverWonderGrass series from the outfitter Adrift Dinosaur.

The Gates of Ladore trip, as it’s known, will cover 44 miles through three dramatic gorges—Ladore, Whirlpool, and Split Mountain—and two dozen mostly mild rapids in this remote, geologic wonderland along the Colorado-Utah border. That is, if we ever shove off: Watching the guides struggle to distribute our obscene pile of gear and booze, I have doubts.

One could approach this as purely a party float. But to Adrift owner Scotty Stoughton, these trips “are about connection, about finding musicians who are OK hanging out with their fans, talking about life, going deep.” Stoughton, while innovative, is not alone. People have been making music on rivers for centuries, and other rafting outfitters, including Arta and Middle Fork River Expeditions, also offer featured-artist trips.

Minutes after departing, we trade scrubby hills of sage, rabbitbrush, and juniper for soaring citadels of quartzite—some 600 million years old—that rise like batik tapestries from the clear currents of the Green.

I had volunteered for the front row in the lone six-person paddle raft, a craft smaller than the standard oar boats and carrying minimal gear. In doing so I failed to grasp..l, failing to grasp that the 62-degree water, whipping wind, and shade from the canyon walls would leave me shivering like an idiot for most of the afternoon.

But I shouldn’t whine. American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell faced far steeper challenges when he made the first recorded run of this waterway in June 1869 during his legendary survey of the Colorado River system. Powell’s mettle is well documented, and all the more impressive because he faced those hardships without a live band.

For our part, we’ve got some of the best musicians you’ve never heard of: Guitarist Tyler Grant, a national bluegrass flatpicking champion who doubles as a senior guide for Adrift (he took a test run on this river with Stoughton in 2020 and promptly enrolled in guide schoo. Bassist Adrian (Ace) Engfer could pass for a metal head with long sandy hair and a penchant for trucker’s caps, tank tops and jorts. Finally, mandolinist Michael Kirkpatrick is an ebullient outdoorsman with a brown curly shag, straw hat, and handlebar mustache.

Individually, they’ve produced numerous albums and played with some of the top jam-grass bands in the country. Together, their shared love of the Grateful Dead has earned them steady gigs, including at Stoughton’s Winter Wondergrass festival in Steamboat, Colorado.

The rest of us are what you’d expect to find on this $1,700 whimsy: mostly middle-aged hippie types who moonlight as lawyers, conservationists, psychologists, brewpub owners, consultants, parents and poet-philosophers.

Class III Disaster Falls and Jam Circles

Lunch on the first day provides our first adventure, with 30-knot winds flinging components of our build-your-own Greek salad wraps across a rocky beach. But things quickly improve: Tyler, who also serves as our resident historian and geologist, leads a hike up a steep ravine to Winnie’s Grotto, a towering chimney of auburn quartzite.

When I ask him how music might sound in this natural amphitheater, he and Ace lay down an a cappella duet of Where the Soul of Man Never Dies, a traditional gospel hymn of deliverance by death, their sonorous harmonies rising like ghosts through the chasm.

From a boating perspective, the highlight of the afternoon is the Class III (rapids are ranked from I-V; and III includes higher, irregular waves) Disaster Falls, a series of ledges, rock gardens and wave trains so-named by Powell after he lost a supply-laden boat here. From a cold paddler’s perspective, the highlight comes one mile later, when we reach the first of our three idyllic camps, a grove of boxelders that recede, through a broad meadow, to sun-basted canyon walls.

Over beers and homemade guac, lead guide Joy McCreary circles us up and asks everyone to state the important stuff—name, hometown, and favorite Dead tune—an icebreaker that also gives the band a list to work from.

And when Pickin’ on the Dead opens the music three hours later with one such request, Uncle John’s Band, they showcase a Grateful Dead fluency that they’ll carry throughout the trip. As both a longtime fan (I’ve been attended live shows since 1980) and guitarist, I can tell you this isn’t easy. Start with the fact that these guys have zero artificial amplification, and many of their selections—Shakedown Street, Help on the Way, Estimated Prophet and Terrapin Station, to name a few—rely, in their original forms, on pedal effects, reverb, electric keys and other conveniences of voltage.

To compensate, the three bring an energy, precision and fluidity you don’t hear in many jam circles. Tyler uses melodic foundations to launch exploratory journeys, with nods to his training in bluegrass and classical music. Michael’s mandolin is at times a flute, snare drum or synthesizer, and during a syncopated funk groove on Feel Like a Stranger, all three at once. But it’s Ace’s bass lines, tumbling through the melodies like time-worn river stones in a rapid, that make this experience possible. Without the bottom end, much of the flashy leadwork would be lost to the canyon winds.

At the best moments, the musical trialogue would transcend the individual parts, an auditory flower in bloom, echoing off the pre-Cambrian walls and rising, our collective spirit in tow, toward the starlight-limned canyon rims.

By day, we sluice along, ferried at a steady 1,650 cupic feet per second (a flow regulated by releases from the Flaming Gorge Dam),every bend in the river a portal to almost unfathomable natural beauty, the eons stacked in red, golden ochre, and streaks of pastel green. From camps, we hike along feeder streams, past herds of bighorn sheep, to petroglyphs and pictographs, swimming holes and waterfalls. From Tyler, we learn about old pioneers and older rocks, river health, and how a guy named Bus Hatch defeated plans for a dam at Echo Park that would have drowned much of this stunning, isolated country.

And, true to Stoughton’s vision, we connect. Over four days, I have memorable conversations with people I wouldn’t have met otherwise on mortality, parenting, personal tragedies, and the power of ancestral memory.

Music Is the Unifying Force

Given the layers of self-selection here—river-loving Deadheads willing to camp off-grid for three nights, with a shared bucket for a toilet—this is unsurprising but, pardon the cliché, there really is something to untethering from our screens and routines, saturating in the literal sands and waters of time, and giving our fellow humans the attention we all deserve. Not to push it too far, but for a moment I find myself believing that, just maybe, Americans really could all get along.

Of course, the music is the unifying force, and it comes in waves: sets on the beach, around breakfast, atop a red-rock promontory high above the river and, on costume night, in a moonlit meadow, the band adorned in silver Zoltar body suits trippily illuminated by their red-light headlamps.

At one pit stop, guide Maggie Keyek asks that we spend the next two river miles in contemplative silence. She then reads a poem of hers, an ode to this elemental kingdom and “our true river weird selves,” in which she posits that time on the river changes us irrevocably, even if subtly.

A half hour later, as we drift beneath Steamboat Rock, a sheer wall of sandstone rising 300 feet above the water, the pluck of a mandolin string steals through the silence.

With Tyler standing at the oars, the band advances from the back of the pack, Ace and Michael on the bow playing Jimmy Cliff’s Sitting Here in Limbo. It’s almost ridiculous, a shroom-fueled notion overheard in a Dead show parking lot circa 1983: “And then the band will float into view, already playing a tune!” “Dude!”

Somewhere in this ancient, meditative landscape, it occurs to me that river running and collaborative live music share a gene: both demand knowledge of the rules and a willingness to bend them, adherence to a plan, and the ability to chuck it.

“The music flows through you,” Tyler says, “just like the river. If you’re doing it right, you don’t really have a choice: You just go with the current.”

What to Know Before You Book a Music-Themed River Trip

No rafting experience needed for this guided trip, although it can help. Pick music you know you enjoy; you’re going to hear a lot of it!

Leave your instrument at home. People are paying to hear the featured artists.

With most outfitters, these trips fall between roughing it and glamping. Expect to set up your own tent and manage your camp, although guides are typically willing to help. Most outfitters rent tents and sleeping bags, if needed.

Be ready to pitch in loading and unloading rafts, setting up communal areas, and helping things run smoothly. Successful group trips require agreeable group participation!

The bathroom, which consists of a portable toilet seat on a watertight container, is set up at each camp in a private, usually scenic spot. Don’t expect a bidet, but it’s actually quite pleasant.

With group meals and general closeness, personal hygiene is paramount. Never bypass a handwashing station—set-up each day by the guides.

How to Book: Adrift Dinosaur runs multi-day music-themed river trips from late May through mid-September. Details and booking at Adrift.com