Specialty River Trips with Music, Stargazing, and More

River running is enough in itself. But when you’re surrounded by canyons and stars and endless river bends, your mind starts to expand with all sorts of possibilities. Specialty river trips let you combine your passion for river running with other pursuits. Why not add some bluegrass music, watercolor painting, or guided stargazing to the program?

 

Adrift Dinosaur, which runs RiverWonderGrass music trips, and Holiday River Expeditions are two Southwestern river companies that have expanded their programs to include on-river concerts, yoga, writing workshops, painting, and more.

Here are a few reasons to consider booking a specialty river trip with a commercial outfitter, whether you’re a first-time river tripper or a seasoned private boater who’s looking to shake things up. (And if you’re looking for good kid-friendly commercial trips, check out How to Choose the Best Commercial Rafting Trips for Kids).

Be entertained

River trips with live bands are the most common specialty trips among the commercial outfitters. Lauren Wood, Trip Director of Holiday River Expeditions, said their themed trips grew from what they saw when river guides would break out an acoustic guitar in the evening.

“People have been playing music around a campfire throughout human history, since time immemorial,” said Wood. “So in that long-honored cultural tradition, we figured let’s pair these incredible places with a level of music that could elevate the experience and hopefully help people connect to the place. Music can evoke certain emotions in the human spirit. These trips have been hugely successful.”

Wood said they used to reach out to bands to recruit them for river trips. But these days, bands more often reach out to them.

“It’s not every day you can do your concert on top of a cliff edge,” they said. “Many of the bands have just fallen in love with these rivers, and it’s a special occasion for them every time they get to come out again.” The customer fans are just as eager to rebook with their favorite bands as soon as the next year’s dates are announced. 

Adrift Dinosaur has embedded music trips into their repertoire, a venture fueled by the music passion of Scotty Stoughton, the multi-faceted founder of Bonfire Entertainment (the outfit behind the WinterWonderGrass and RiverWonderGrass music festivals), co-founder of Stand Up Paddle Colorado, lyricist and singer with the Colorado band Bonfire Dub, and co-owner of Adrift along with fellow paddler Javier Placer. Most of their music trips, which feature bands like the Fretliners, Pickin’ on the Dead, and Magoo, sell out quickly. 

“The first real music trips, what eventually became RiverWonderGrass, started a couple years after they took over Adrift,” said Adrift guide Carter Freericks. “At first they experimented with different specialty trips. They were testing the idea before they fully dialed in the RiverWonderGrass concept of combining great bands with great food and a multi-day river trip.”

Music trips are now about 50 percent of Adrift’s offerings, Freericks said. All of the bands play with acoustic instruments because Adrift operates in Dinosaur National Monument, which doesn’t allow amplified music.

So how do you get an upright bass safely down the river? Some bands bring acoustic basses with removable necks. “But we’ve definitely had situations where the neck of a bass is sticking out of a pile of dry bags in the raft,” Freericks said.

Although the number of concerts varies from trip to trip, Freericks said that Adrift’s goal is to have one official music set each night at camp. 

“But there are also spontaneous moments,” he said. “Someone might play guitar during breakfast or coffee. We also do surprise sets at scenic spots along the river. One of the signature moments is the floating jam at the confluence near Steamboat Rock.”

Adding live music to a trip expands Adrift’s customer base, as it does for Holiday. 

“These might be people who would normally avoid a commercial river trip,” he said. “But the idea of floating down the river with a band they love makes it appealing. Many of them already have outdoor hobbies—climbing, skiing, paddling, things like that. They might even be thinking about buying a raft or inflatable kayak themselves someday.”

Deepen your knowledge

How about some guided stargazing on your river trip? Holiday’s stargazing trips were sparked by longtime guide Tom Beckett, who Wood said started guiding with their grandfather (Dee Holladay, legendary founder of Holiday) in 1968. After leaving the river life to become a lawyer, Beckett returned as a part-time guide in his later years.

“And around that same time, he became just a huge nerd for the night sky,” Wood said. “He had a guest from New York City on a trip who looked at the night sky and commented, ‘What’s all that pollution in the sky right there?’ Tom looked up and realized it was the Milky Way. The customer, a 50-year-old man, had just never seen it. And it dawned on him, dark skies are innate to the human spirit and something that we can’t take for granted.”

Wood said although Holiday has always emphasized to their customers the surrounding plant life, wildlife, geology, and human history on river trips, “We had yet to really look up and think about what was happening at night.” 

Holiday has been running stargazing trips now for the past 10 years, with Beckett using telescopes and props to point out not only constellations but the lore behind the stars and how humans have connected to the night sky over millennia.

Hang out with your affinity group

River outfitters now also offer affinity trips to provide a safe, welcoming environment for all. Wood said that Holiday considers the women’s trips they launched in the late 1980s to be their first affinity trips. 

“These were our first trips for people who wanted to be on the river with other people who had a shared identity, so we look at those as our first affinity trips.”

Their affinity program has grown over the years through partnerships with The Venture Out Project (TVOP) and other groups including Diversify Whitewater to include LGBTQ+` and BIPOC-friendly trips.  

“This is a demographic of people who have real reasons they aren’t out on the river, or if they are out on the river, they don’t feel safe necessarily,” said Wood. “So our thought was, let’s create a container where people can actually heal in these places and find themselves in nature. It’s so powerful to hear people’s stories and how they’re connecting to themselves in a different way out there.”

Let the guides do the hard stuff

Special-interest trips have expanded river outfitters’ pool of potential customers because they attract boaters who are perfectly capable of running their own private trips on the same stretch of water.

“We do get private boaters who are getting to a point in their life where they just don’t want to have to do all of the hard work,” said Wood. “They want to just enjoy the experience that they’ve been doing for so long.”

Follow your curiosity in a river setting

Specialty river trips give you time and space to explore new skills, learn some new things, or just soak up some transformative music in the best possible setting.