A group of Fort Benton educators and historians created the very first river company on the present-day Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. They had a couple rules that they abided by such as, “no women allowed” and “every man had to have plenty of booze for the duration of the trip”. To say that it was a motley crew would be an understatement. The first trip on the river they purchased a whole bunch of life rafts and used plywood decks on top. A quick journal entry from their first trip reads, “the water dropped the next morning and we had to portage our boats 500 yards downstream to get out of the mud.” They quickly learned that those were not the boat of choice for the Upper Missouri River Breaks. After the life raft experience, they started using pontoon boat and old barrel boats. During the groups voyages they discovered and found exact locations of historic landmarks that we still use in maps today.