Live Music in the Heart of Lodore Canyon
“Ripple, in still water…” The song is oddly fitting. Grateful Dead cover band Pickin’ on the Dead is playing the tune at the Rippling Brook camp on the Green River’s Gates of Lodore in northwest Colorado. But they’re not actually in camp—they’re on top a Precambrian-era, quartzite spire of the Lodore Formation, some of the oldest rock on earth. We had all hiked to a nearby waterfall, took turns getting drenched, and strolled back down to find them playing on the precipice, complete with watermelon and a cooler of beers. It’s a nice touch by outfitter Adrift Dinosaur, one of many we’ll savor on one of their uber-popular, multi-day RiverWonderGrass trips down Yampa Canyon and Lodore. “Tickets and ID?” jokes guide Soren, as we stoop under a juniper branch onto 20×20-foot natural patio overlooking the river far below.
Other songs from the happiest of happy hours sets include Bertha, Sugaree, Box of Rain, and Cassidy—the latter appropriate as nearby Browns Park used to house Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall Gang (RIP Robert Redford). They’ll play even more tonight back at camp, for concert number three of six on this four-day trip.
What Is RiverWonderGrass?
Everyone likes a good round of campfire guitar singing on a river trip. But Adrift out of Jensen, Utah, is taking it a step further with its RiverWonderGrass trips down Dinosaur National Moument’s Lodore and Yampa canyons. Professional bands tag along, playing at camp each night, on the water, and even occasional pinnacles like this one overlooking the river. Wherever they play, their songs echo off canyon walls and into the hearts and memory banks of their clients forever.
“What a glorious time we had together,” participant Jadu Jagel, a psychologist who flew in 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 with awe all 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.”
The Origins of Music Rafting Trips
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 2010, offering their first such trip a year later in 2020. The trips have since become so popular that they’ve expanded the line-up to nine such trips this year alone, including such bands as 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.
Some of Adrift’s Most Popular Trips
“They’ve become amazingly popular in such a short time,” says Adrift co-owner Scotty Stoughton, who also organizes the annual three-day WinterWonderGrass bluegrass festival in nearby Steamboat Springs as well as BajaGrass every April. “They sell out all the time. Something about river trips and music just seems to resonate with people. I’ve heard from countless people that it just makes their lives so much better. Time’s moving so fast these days and people are more anxious than ever, and this helps slow that all down.”
You know you’re in for a treat when you’re chain-lining gear at the put-in and you’re handing off guitars, bases and mandolins alongside groovers and water jugs to the next person in line. And this trip added the common bond of the Grateful Dead. At the first night’s introduction we circled around and introduced ourselves, with instructions to mention 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 1978 at Red Rocks?” chimed in someone across the circle.
Indeed, the trip drew an eclectic group of 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. That it all takes place in one of the most spectacular canyons in Colorado and 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 from Green River, Wyoming, on down through the Grand Canyon, 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 a little music in to boot 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 every morning and, after whipping up Greek gyros, taking the lid off the Dutch oven’s 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.
Why Guests Love the Experience
For Joy, it’s these trips that brought her here. “That’s why I came to Adrift, because I wanted to be on these RiverGrass music trips,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to make magic in a place that does it for you on its own. People want to be here. Some of our guides come here just to guide these music trips.”
Her favorite part is 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 and get along. 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 a little tighter knit,” she says.
We got a taste of what was in store our first night at the Pot Creek 1 camp. “Sorry about those parking spaces up front,” joked mandolin player Michael as the three musicians took their seats 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 was up and dancing, raising their arms toward the canyon rims. The only real rule the band adhered 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,” said Michael between songs.
The next morning, Tyler greets everyone with a coffeehouse session, while we watch the sun bathe the cliffs in a soft, low-angle glow. “Oops, got stuck on a couple of rocks there,” he said, on a rare stumble on a chord progression for a new original. It’s oddly foreshadowing. A few hours later, he gets hung up on some real rocks in the river, in the tricky, shallow section below Huggy Bear in a rapid known as 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 later at camp. “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, the stage and the band 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 music of the Grateful Dead. “Their music is very liquid,” he says. “The songs are kind of like a canyon, and we’re going to fill that with water. We’re the snowmelt and the sounds are the canyon. How we flow through them is going to be different every time. We can all flow through those song canyons our own way.”
Another great feature of the trips in that the band members are guests on the trip, 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 way closer than at any more conventional concert. And the bands like it as much as the clients do. They get to cut loose a bit, with all the worry and stress of conventional gigs evaporating like the water off the river that turns into the cumulus clouds above the quartzite canyon rim lit by alpenglow.
“They love it—we have bands that come back every year,” says Joy. “It’s a nice break from their traditional summer tours. And I love how it affects the musicians as much as the clients.”
Perhaps no one loves it more than Pickin’ on the Dead frontman and award-winning flatpicker Tyler, who, after falling in love with rivers and showing their magic to others, has been working as a guide for Adrift since 2021. “I always wanted to be involved in outdoor leadership,” says Tyler, who grew up in eastern San Diego and moved to Nashville for seven years once his music career took off. “This provided a way to do that while still maintaining a music career.”
He always had the dream of moving to Colorado, and when he realized he was developing a fan base for his music and instruction courses, he made the move and never looked back. Tyler is now putting the finishing touches on his new Lodore Suite album, due out in 2026, with songs related to such rapids as Disaster Falls and Hell’s Half Mile. “I don’t compose music while I’m out here on the river,” he says. “I’m too busy. But I collect ideas and lines and things to say for later. Sometimes it’s a melody or a riff or the line of a lyric. It’s the lyrics that take the most refinement.”
The recipe, like the vittles the guides whip up every night, is working. This year nearly two-thirds of Adrift’s 25 multi-day trips down either the Yampa or Gates of Lodore, have been 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 feel that change that comes from being on the river,” says Joy. “I feel it will feed back into life after the trip, feeling that experience here and bringing that back home and to work and their everyday lives.”
On day three, we float into Echo Canyon and the confluence with the Yampa, a magical site and also the location of a heralded success story for protecting endangered peregrine falcons. Tyler has us all yell “Jerry!” at the same time and we hear it reverberate two seconds later off the canyon walls. We paddle up the Yampa a way and then Tyler and company break out their instruments for a concert on the water, their voices echoing off the canyon walls. During “Terrapin Station” they improvise and change the word to “peregrine,” which blends right in. Us guests, meanwhile, groove way and take it all in, floating in duckies, rafts, and even our 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 Jones Hole 2 for our final evening and 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. The band doesn’t miss a beat, either, showing up as a full moon rises over the canyon rim in silver, one-piece suits and rectangular Devo-type sunglasses (they say they’re from the planet Zoltar). Everyone loves it and we groove the night away, dancing with our hands in the air in the moonlight. What a long, strange—but incredible—trip it’s been…
Check RIver Wonder Grass Availability Here
Watch video of trip with the Kitchen Dwellers here!
Hey, Deadies…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
Day 2 Morning (Originals from Tyler Grant’s Lodore Suite):
Springtime Flatpicking, Canyon Flatpicking, Disaster Falls, Goat Canyon Trestle
Camp2: 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 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
Trip Information and Booking
Adrift runs 25 multi-day trips each year, with nine dedicated RiverWonderGrass music rafting trips. Some are public, while others are private charters booked for specific bands.