#1670 Paddling the Full Lewis and Clark Trail

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

Clay interviews Montana adventurer Norm Miller, who has undertaken truly heroic canoe and kayak journeys on great rivers of the West. When he was 35, he retraced Scottish trader Alexander Mackenzie’s 1789 2,000-mile journey from Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean. When he was 41, during the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Norm floated from St. Louis all the way to Astoria, Oregon, leaving his modified canoe only when there was no longer anything to float, and then making his way overland with a 45-pound backpack. Both stories are amazing — a lone man threading some of the most powerful rivers on the North American continent, keeping a daily journal, taking thousands of old school photographs, affirming the geographic descriptions in the journals of Lewis and Clark and Alex Mackenzie, and meeting very interesting roadside groups and individuals. This episode was recorded on September 13, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast. It's a discussion with
0:05.5	Norm Miller, a businessman and adventurer from Livingston, Montana. In 1998, he followed Alexander
0:14.0	McKenzie's water trip from Lake Athabasca in Canada all the way to the mouth of the McKenzie up at the Arctic Circle.
0:23.3	Then in 2004, during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition,
0:27.9	he solo journeyed from St. Charles, Missouri, all the way to the Pacific Ocean in a kayak.
0:36.3	He made his way up in Missouri through all those dams. The six main stem dams, or 18 total on the Missouri, but the six main stem dams in the Dakotas and eastern Montana went around the Great Falls, of course. Then he hiked along the Jefferson on the Lost Trail and got himself to the Nez Perth Trail, which is west of Missoula,
0:57.0	up over the Bitterroot Mountains to Weye Prairie, and then at Orofino got back in his boat and down the Columbia,
1:06.0	and at Orofino got back in his boat and down with Columbia all the way to Astoria.
1:13.2	A massive, gigantic, epic journey.
1:16.6	And he hasn't written a book about it, so I'll be nagging him about that.
1:20.4	But he did post things on the then still pretty young internet.
1:25.0	He's going to be sending me that plus some photographs.
1:27.2	It's an amazing account. He's also to be sending me that, plus some photographs. It's an amazing account.
1:28.5	He's also hiked all the way up from Hell Roaring Creek up the mountain to the true source,
1:36.5	the spring, Brower Spring, which is the farthest source of the Missouri River from the Gulf of Mexico.
1:43.2	And he's promised to take me there next summer.
1:45.6	I can't wait. I'm with a train for that. I love this story. This is a man who did these things alone.
1:52.4	He was 35 in the McKenzie River journey in Canada and 41 when he retraced Lewis and Clark.
1:59.2	I've done enough canoeing and hiking and so on along the Lewis and Park Trail
2:03.6	to know what an extraordinary achievement that was.
2:07.6	This is not for the faint of heart, but he did it.
2:11.6	It's amazing.
	...

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