“Riiipppplllee, in still water…” The song is oddly fitting. Grateful Dead cover band Pickin’ on the Dead is playing it near Rippling Brook camp on the Green River’s Gates of Lodore canyon, atop a quartzite spire of the Lodore Formation, some of the oldest rock on earth. We had just returned from a hike to a nearby waterfall and found them playing on the precipice, complete with watermelon wedges and a cooler of beers. It’s a nice touch by outfitter Adrift Dinosaur, one of many we’ll savor on their multi-day RiverWonderGrass trip. “Tickets and ID?” jokes guide Soren, as we duck under a juniper branch onto a natural patio overlooking the river far below.
Other songs from the happiest of happy hours include Bertha, Sugaree, Box of Rain, and Cassidy—the latter perhaps a nod to nearby Browns Park, former home of Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall Gang. They’ll play more tonight back at camp, for concert number three of six on this four-day trip.
Everyone likes a good round of campfire guitar singing on a river trip. But Adrift out of Jensen, Utah, takes it a step further with its RiverWonderGrass trips through Dinosaur National Moument. Professional bands tag along, playing at camp, on the water, and even on occasional pinnacles like this one, their songs echoing off canyon walls and into the memory banks of their clients forever.
“What a glorious time we had together,” participant Jadu Jagel, a psychologist from Honolulu, will write the group afterward. “Pure canyon magic…truly a banquet for the senses and the soul. This was a total dream come true for me and I’m incredibly grateful remembering those magical moments…the bends in the river, songs in the air, droplets of rain, clouds overhead, wildlife, and red hued crags against the sky, and, hot damn, the cliff rock concert.”
Adrift certainly isn’t the first outfitter to incorporate music into their trips. Other outfitters have been booking music on their outings for years, mostly on multi-day trips out West. But they’re the first to take it to this level, integrating it in as a staple of their offerings. The floating formula—combining musical acts, often bluegrass, with boating—is working. Adrift co-owners Scotty Stoughton and Javier Placer conceived the dream when they bought the business in 2019, offering their first such trip a year later in 2020. They’ve since expanded the line-up to nine such trips last year alone, including the Kitchen Dwellers, Fruition, Tyler Grant, Pixie and the PartyGrass Boys, and more. Ours features Pickin’ on the Dead, led by frontman and part-time Adrift raft guide Tyler Grant, a national flatpick champion.
“They’ve become amazingly popular in a short time,” says Adrift co-owner Scotty Stoughton, who also organizes Steamboat’s three-day WinterWonderGrass bluegrass festival as well as BajaGrass every April. “They sell out all the time. Something about river trips and music just seems to resonate with people. People say it just makes their lives better. Time’s moving so fast these days and this helps slow that all down.”
I knew we in for a treat when, while chain-lining gear at the put-in, we handed off guitars, basses and mandolins alongside groovers, food and water jugs. And this trip added the common bond of the Grateful Dead. At the first night’s introduction we circled around and introduced ourselves, mentioning the favorite Dead song we wanted to hear. Countless Berthas, Box of Rains, Scarlet Begonias, Terrapins, and Dire Wolfs later, I threw out Shakedown Street from my high school days. “Are you talking from 1973?” chimed in someone across the circle.
Indeed, the trip drew an eclectic group of diehard Dead Heads, flying in from as far as Washington DC, Boston, Pittsburgh, Portland, Bellingham, the Bay Area and even Hawaii for four days of the Dead in Lodore. It’s a combo that’s hard to beat. Named by John Wesley Powell after the English poem Cataract of Lodore during his first descent in 1869, the 44-mile trip is filled with Class II-III rapids and towering canyon walls, making it one of the best multi-day rafting trips in the country. Throw in a little music and you won’t want it to end.
And it’s no ship of fools at the helm or in the galley. Adrift’s guides know their way around a river kitchen as well as they do the canyon, making sure coffee is ready at sunrise and, after whipping up Greek gyros, baking pineapple upside-down cake just in time for the evening concert. Our trip is led by trip leader Joy McCreary, 27, and her fleet of guides, including Soren, McCall, Miguelito, Mags, Bryson, and Tyler. “That’s why I came to Adrift—I wanted to be on these music trips,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to make magic in a place that does it for you on its own. Some of our guides come here just to guide them.”
And she loves the camaraderie they evoke. “I love the community it brings,” she says. “People that like the same music are generally more cohesive and jive together. It’s an extra layer of community and a common bond. I never want them to end.” She adds that bands like Pickin’ on the Dead, featuring Tyler Grant on guitar, Michael Kirkpatrick on mandolin, and Ace Engfer on bass, bring that common bond up another level. “The Dead community is even tighter knit,” she says.
We get a taste of what’s in store our first night at Pot Creek 1 camp. “Sorry about those parking spaces up front,” jokes Michael as the three musicians sat on rocket boxes in front of a propane fire pit, facing the guests in an amphitheater of chairs. “And the chairs are just a suggestion.”
A good one at that. Soon, everyone is up and dancing, raising their arms toward the canyon rims. The only real rule the band adheres to is no repeats for the entire four-day trip. That means by trip’s end they will have played 54 Grateful Dead songs, as well as a handful of originals and covers. And the guests on this trip have likely heard them all. “You know it’s a trip full of Dead Heads when no one requests Fire on the Mountain,” adds Michael.
The next morning, Tyler greets everyone with a coffeehouse session, while the sun bathedsthe cliffs in a soft glow. “Oops, got stuck on a couple of rocks there,” he says, on a rare chord progression stumble for a new original. A few hours later, he gets hung up on some real rocks in the river, in the shallow section below Huggy Bear in Hell’s Half Mile. No matter. Music and river running are improbably similar, he says, and some quick bouncing has them off and on their way again.
“You have to stay in the current and try to find that flow state, just like music,” he says. “In both, you’re existing in dynamic environments where nothing stays the same and you have to react to an ever-changing environment. Like a river, a performance is always going to be different. You can never depend on any sort of consistency in music, or on a river.”
That holds especially true for the Grateful Dead. “Their music is very liquid,” he says. “The songs are kind of like a canyon, and we fill that with water. We’re the snowmelt and the sounds are the canyon. How we flow through them is different every time.”
Another great feature of these trips: the band members are guests, just like you. You wait in line for the groover and coffee with them, share stories around the campfire, wash dishes and scout rapids together, and schlep gear together—all of which brings you closer than at a more conventional concert. And the bands like it as much as the clients do. They get to cut loose, the stress of conventional gigs evaporating like the water off the river. “They love it—we have bands that come back every year,” says Joy. “It’s a nice break from their traditional summer tours. The trip affects the musicians as much as the clients.”
Perhaps no one loves it more than band frontman and award-winning flatpicker Tyler, who, after falling in love with rivers, has been working as a guide for Adrift since 2021. He grew up in eastern San Diego and moved to Nashville for seven years once his music career took off. “I always wanted to be involved in outdoor leadership,” he says. “This lets me do that while still maintaining a music career.”
When his fan base for his music and instruction developed enough, he moved to Colorado and has never looked back. Tyler is now finishing his new Lodore Suite album, due out in 2026. “I don’t compose music while I’m out on the river,” he says. “I’m too busy. But I collect ideas and lines for later. Sometimes it’s a melody or a riff or a lyric.”
As with Tyler getting inspiration from the river, Adrift’s recipe combining raft trips with music is working. This year nearly two-thirds of Adrift’s 25 multi-day trips are music trips, nine open to the public and six private “chartered” trips, where someone books out the whole trip with a band. The draw is the feelings they evoke. “I love seeing people change from being on the river,” says Joy. “I feel it feeds back into their everyday lives after the trip.”
On day three, we float into Echo Canyon and the confluence with the Yampa, site of a heralded success story for protecting endangered peregrine falcons. Tyler has us all yell “Jerry!” and we hear it reverberate off the canyon walls. We paddle up the Yampa a way and then they play a concert on the water, their voices echoing in the natural amphitheater. During “Terrapin Station” they change the word to “peregrine,” which blends right in. The guests groove way and take it all in, floating in duckies, rafts, and even their PFDs in the water. I’m not sure it’s what former Sierra Club president David Brower envisioned when he helped save these canyons from being buried by a dam in 1958, but I’m sure he’d approve.
That night we camp at Jone’s Hole for our final concert. After hiking up Jones Canyon to view Fremont petroglyphs and refresh ourselves under a waterfall, we return for costume night, with even the guides letting their river hair out. As a full moon rises over the canyon rim, they show up in silver, one-piece suits and rectangular Devo-type sunglasses, saying they’re from the planet Zoltar. And then they start jamming. Everyone loves it and we gyrate the night away, dancing with our hands in the moonlit air. What a long, strange—but incredible—trip it’s been.
Split Mountain Fun: Don’t have time for a four-day river trip? Get a taste of Dinosaur’s scenery and splashes on an Adrift day trip down Split Mountain Canyon this summer. Info: https://adrift.com/riverwondergrass/
Hey, Deadheads…Want the Set List?
Camp 1:
Pot Creek : Uncle John’s Band, Shady Grove, Candyman, Brown Eyed Women, Queen Jane Approximately, China/Rider, High Time (For Joy), Cumberland Blues, Why Don’t You Turn Out The Light (Ace Original), Joyful Song (Tyler Original), Wildwood (Michael Original), One More Saturday Night, Brokedown Palace
Camp 2:
Set 1: Rippling Brook Rock: Bertha, Sugaree, Box of Rain, Help/Slip/Franklins, Cassidy
Set 2 (Rippling Brook 1 Camp): Let the Good Times Roll, Feel Like a Stranger, Bird Song, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, Stealin’, Monkey & The Engineer, Me & My Uncle, Mountains of the Moon, Scarlet Begonias, Breadbox, The Other One, Breadbox, Truckin’, Eyes, Throwing Stones, Midnight Moonlight, Must Have Been T=the Roses, Ripple
Day 3
Set 1 (Echo Park/Yampa River): Sitting Here in Limbo, Come Back Home To Me (Michael Original), Here Comes Sunshine, Terrapin, Music Never Stopped, Row Jimmy
Set 2 – Jones Hole 2 Camp: Shakedown Street, Friend of the Devil, Let it Grow, Mighty Saguaro (Ace Original), Saint Of Circumstance, Ship of Fools, Estimated Prophet, Saint Stephen, Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad, Sugar Magnolia, Black Muddy River
