Dean Sundog,
My group of friends has done river trips together for decades. We apply for permits and then invite one another. I took a hiatus for a few years when my kids were too little for whitewater, and when I came back on a trip last year (I left the kids with grandparents), I discovered that all my old friends still loved to get shitfaced. I was taken aback.
Look, I used to party hard on the river when I was 25. But we’re in our forties and fifties now. Some of my buddies were boozing for breakfast, gobbling THC gummies all day long, and tripping on mushrooms.
Worth mentioning that these are high-functioning adults: parents, nurses, lawyers, etc. Also, they are experienced boaters, so I never worried about their safety. It’s just that there is a lot to enjoy in nature, and being wasted for an entire trip removes that part of the experience for me.
Now the tough part: I’ve got a permit for the Salmon River in Idaho, and I’m hesitant to invite my most hammered friends. I drink, but in moderation, and I’d rather invite friends who want to be sober on occasion. But I still love my partying friends, and I know they have the gear and skills to get down the river safely. What should I do?
— Caught in the Eddy
Dear Caught,
Drunkenness looms large in the history of river running, dating at least back to the 1869 descent of the Green and Colorado rivers led by the one-armed explorer John Wesley Powell. A teetotaler himself, Powell was surprised to discover that his young crewmen had smuggled a keg of whiskey aboard one of the wooden ships that was subsequently wrecked in a rapid named Disaster Falls, near the present-day Colorado-Utah state line.
The crew let out a lusty whoop when they recovered the booze. “I am glad they did it,” he conceded in his journal, “for they think it does them good—as they are drenched every day by the melted snow that runs down this river from the summit of the Rocky Mountains—and that is a positive good itself.”
One of the great things about river trips is that you say goodbye to life’s mechanized order. Phones don’t work. Clocks don’t matter. You can quickly begin to move with the rhythms of the current and the sun. Thus removed from the bonds of modernity, it’s also liberating to flaunt society’s other rules. Crack a beer at breakfast? Why not. Spend the day swirling in eddies and tripping on clouds? Great.
That said, I sometimes wish that my river friends were less hammered. I’ve been in groups that whip themselves into a sort of Trimalchian frenzy of inebriation, as if to shatter some ceiling of decorum, only to find liberation receding like a mirage with each gulp of Hornitos. I get it. People should not destroy themselves.
And yet, there are worse types of people to have on the river than the intoxicated. An expedition can be bummerized by a compulsive rule-follower, a bickering couple, a know-it-all, a tight-ass, a chore-shirker, or even a prig who shuns the others and sticks to his tent reading Walden.
Yes, your friends are brutes. They have problems. Yet, I tend to think of singer Townes Van Zandt’s take on the afterlife applies to float trips, too: “If there ain’t no whiskey and women, Lord, behind them heavenly doors, I’m gonna take my chances down below, and of that you can be sure.”
You specified that your friends are safe and competent on the water. If that were not the case, I’d certainly not invite them. You’ve also indicated that you’re not sober and/or in recovery. If that were the case, I’d tell you to ditch your friends. But your situation is a bit more blurry.
Now that river permits have become harder to get than Unobtainium, you are ethically bound to invite the specific person who invited you last year. Anything else is a rude snub. As for the others in the group, there may be subtle ways to influence their behavior, rather than dis-inviting them.
I’ve found that bringing small children on a trip instills in the adults a sort of contagious innocent awe at Creation far greater than anything chemicals induce. Other activities, such as side hikes, gourmet cooking, games, poetry readings, and music jams, will not end the intake, but can at least give some other focus to the afternoon than the ritualistic, almost competitive, intoxication that might otherwise reign supreme.
You can also, as trip leader, request that your friends partake less—but I’d advise that you be honest about the reasons, rather than claiming it has to do with safety or law. And as a last resort, you can always keep yourself sober and simply accept your friends’ behavior as part of their complicated personalities.
I would not advise that you sever the fabric of this community you’ve taken years to weave. What went unstated in your letter was that your friends get along with each other. That is actually a goal harder to achieve than getting yourself through a series of rapids. Just ask anyone who’s ever been down the river with a truly dysfunctional group that couldn’t seem to have any fun. Your friends know how to have a good time. And that, to quote Major Powell, is a positive good itself.
Have an ethical query? Send to sundogsalmanac@hotmail.com
Mark Sundeen has guided and run western rivers for three decades and has become quite tolerant of all that transgresses upon their banks. His latest book, Delusions and Grandeur: Dreamers of the New West, is on the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He teaches environmental writing at the University of Montana.
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