The Longest Undammed River: Rafting Through Gardiner

The Yellowstone River is one of the longest undammed rivers in the contiguous United States, running more than six hundred miles from its headwaters in the high Absaroka Range south of Yellowstone to its confluence with the Missouri River in North Dakota. It passes through Gardiner, crossing beneath the bridge on United States Highway Eighty-Nine just north of the Roosevelt Arch, and continues its descent through a canyon that is one of the most scenic river corridors in Montana.

Below Gardiner, in the canyon between town and Yankee Jim Canyon to the north, commercial river outfitters run whitewater rafting trips from roughly late May through early September. The canyon stretch includes rapids rated Class Two and Class Three, a range that offers genuine whitewater experience while remaining accessible to families and first-time rafters. The setting, with the Absaroka peaks rising above basalt canyon walls and osprey working the river for fish, is extraordinary.

The Yellowstone River also marks the ecological boundary between the park's interior and the surrounding lands in a way that shaped the human settlement of the region. The river's course through the canyon north of Gardiner made the area historically difficult to cross and served as a natural corridor along which game animals and, later, road engineers moved seasonally. Gardiner sits where the Gardiner River meets the Yellowstone, and it grew from prospectors in the eighteen seventies and from its place at the park's north entrance, with a railroad depot arriving in nineteen oh two.