They Were Magnificent Humans: An Oral History of the First MR340

This July 8, hundreds of paddlers will set off from Kaw Point in Kansas City, Kansas, for the 20th annual Missouri River 340, the world’s longest nonstop river race. (Presuming the weather cooperates, of course.) A few days later, hundreds of spectators will gather at the Lewis & Clark Boat House in St. Charles, Missouri, to welcome the arrival of the final competitors and celebrate the race’s conclusion. If you attend this event, you’ll see dozens of tents with vendors selling race T-shirts, artistic paddles, koozies, and other river-related merchandise. You’ll also see a live band, plenty of beer and hot dogs, and a generally festive carnival atmosphere.

But this experience will differ greatly from the first MR340 held in 2006. And this inaugural race can trace its roots back to an unlikely origin: a dream inspired by a few days floating on a homemade raft in the late ’80s.

In 1989, Kansas City native Scott Mansker and three friends built their own raft and floated it on the Missouri River. “We really didn’t know much,” Mansker recalls. “There was no community of Missouri River paddlers in 1989.”

They ended up selling the raft for $100, but the memory of lounging on sandbars, floating at night, and wondering what was around the next bend lingered. “It was a transformative experience for me,” says Mansker. “I was hooked. And then every summer after that, I was finding some junk pontoon boat or something to make yet another trip.”

Mansker learned the river’s islands, sandbars, and moods. While he typically traveled on boats with motors, he paddled sections in a kayak a few times. Every year, he wondered, “Why are we the only ones out here?”

He’d heard about paddling races in other parts of the country and thought, “I wish somebody would put on a race on the Missouri River.” In those moments, he’d grab a legal pad and sketch out the parameters of this hypothetical race: what the rules might be, who would compete, and how far someone could go in a day, two days, or three days. He continued doing this basically every winter for 10 years.

Finally, when he was 37 years old, Mansker decided he’d been thinking about it long enough. He shared the idea with his friend Russ Payzant. “Scott and I were in a boat that we had just finished building,” Payzant recalls. “We were going down the Missouri River, and Scott was saying that he thought he could put out on the internet that we were going to hold a race and have kayakers paddle from Kansas City over to St. Louis. And I said, ‘Gosh, that would be great.’”

The dream became reality on August 2, 2006, when 20 paddlers in 15 boats gathered at Kaw Point to race 340 river miles to St. Charles. Mansker wasn’t sure if anyone would finish, and no one anticipated the challenges they’d face along the way. In honor of the 20th MR340 taking place this summer, here’s a look back at that first race through the experiences of those who participated.

Part I: “The Doors Just Kept Opening”

Mansker and Payzant started planning the race in earnest in early 2006.

Scott Mansker (organizer): I had the domain name: rivermiles.com. I put a website together with basic rules and a sign-up form that you had to print off and mail to me. There were no sponsors. It was definitely a money-losing adventure. But a proof of concept was what we were after. And I thought, “I’m going to race, and then maybe I’ll get a couple people to race with me, and it’ll be just a test of viability for this thing.” I didn’t pay for any advertising because I didn’t want a bunch of people. I wanted five people, and I wanted to be one of them.

And somehow it got away from me. We got entries from people in places like North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas. But most of them were from around Missouri. I quickly realized, “I can’t race. I have to be responsible for the safety of this thing.”

Russ Payzant (organizer): Scott stressed a couple of things [to the competitors], and we had given them a paper that told them to have an emergency blanket — a Mylar foil blanket. We also told them to have water and some kind of signaling device.

Mansker: Between Russ and myself, we had a couple of boats [a small motorized canoe and a motorized cabin boat]. We decided he would be towards the front of the pack in the cabin boat, and I would be towards the back of the pack in the canoe, the goal being every day we’ll creep towards each other, and then we’ll separate again. In this process, I also realized, “I need a Coast Guard permit and a Missouri Water Patrol permit. I need insurance.” And I thought, “OK, this will be the thing where they tell me I can’t do it.” And then they would say, “Yeah, you can do it.” The doors just kept opening. But I’m not sure the Coast Guard or the Water Patrol ever imagined what it would become.

I had sent out a series of seven or eight emails that we called the dispatches, where I went very thoroughly through everything that could go wrong and how to prepare. At the boat ramp, we kind of just reviewed the important stuff, and we were all nervous. There are photos from that first day at the ramp, and everybody’s intently listening to what we have to say. But probably the best information I gave them that day was, “When you get out of the Kansas River, go right.”

But for the most part, it was a reckoning of community. These people around you are the people that will be there to help you, should you need help. Everyone’s a safety boat during the MR340. All that community, I think, was nurtured from the very first race. Out of our trepidation at the ramp, we became a little family really quick.

Part II: “Can I Bring My Dog?”

Twenty paddlers in 15 boats assembled at the Kaw Point boat ramp for the race. Participants included West Hansen from Austin, Texas, Dawn Keller from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and many others from Missouri.

West Hansen (competitor): I was just really looking forward to kind of an easy trip, you know? And I’m not saying it was easy. It’s just down here in the Texas Water Safari race, we have to go over dams, through rapids, over log jams, face alligators, mosquitoes, poisonous spiders, alligator gars. So the idea of the Missouri River and its fast-moving current was just really nice.

James Fawcett (competitor): I think that one of the things that really interested me was the fact that this was the first year, and it was a pretty wild idea, and didn’t seem like a lot of people would be doing it. So, yeah, it was like the Wild West event. You don’t really know what to expect this first time out.

Dawn Keller (competitor): It was a new adventure, a new experience, new friends, new places. It just felt like the right fit for me. And I have always loved the water. I’m particularly fond of salt water, so this was an exception for me to go and do this long river paddle.

Bryan Hopkins (competitor and then-policy coordinator with Missouri Department of Natural Resources): [Mansker] called me, asked me what I thought, and I thought, “Well, I’m struggling just to get people to recognize what a fantastic paddling resource [the Missouri River] is. So I’m not sure how many people you’ll get.” But the whole concept of doing the race just stuck in my head. And I ended up calling him back and saying, “Hey, man, I want to do this thing. I’m gonna race it.” So that was how I entered the first race in a homemade wooden sea kayak. I was probably more interested in just the personal challenge of it, honestly. I wanted to see if I could do that.

Christian Ruiz (competitor): We did have expectations of camping, which we did, cooking, which we did, hanging out with people around fires at night and not paddling through the night. But I think at one point I described it by saying, “It was like adult summer camp.”

Diane McHenry (competitor): They had a little blurb from Scott Mansker on the Missouri Whitewater board. And my husband saw it, and he said, “You want to do this? We’ve never done anything like that before, but it sounds like an adventure.”

Don Wilkinson (competitor): I’m not a racer, but I’m on the river, and I was going to do this. And then I said, “Can I bring my dog?” Because my dog always goes with me. And [Mansker] is like, “Well, there’s nothing in the rules that say you can’t bring a dog.” It was sort of like an art project for me, because I had this spreadsheet that said I was going to be here and here, all these different specific times, and I was going to take the entire 100 hours to get to St. Charles.

Scott Swafford (competitor): There were all kinds of media outlets out there interviewing people, and the consensus was we were all just absolutely nuts to even think about doing it. And I thought that was kind of cool.

Part III: “I Was Absolutely Sure We Killed Somebody.”

By the end of the first day, paddlers had spread out across 66 miles of the river. A storm front from the west brought straight-line winds of up to 70 miles per hour, creating anxious moments for Mansker, Payzant, and the paddlers.

Payzant: [Hansen] got in his boat, and he took off. So I got in the [motorized] cabin boat and left to follow him. Most everybody got to Miami, Missouri, by the time it was getting dark. We had a bunch of clouds come in, and there were some warnings about a storm.

Mansker: We had a horrifying Midwest storm, a microburst, that first night. I was just absolutely sure that someone would, you know, that we killed somebody. I was bringing the last of the paddlers into Waverly at sunset, and you could see lightning in the distance. And as soon as we got everybody in, it just all cut loose. I remember standing in the gravel parking lot at Waverly and feeling sand hitting my face from the parking lot. Branches are breaking, and it’s just all we could do in the park to get everybody under a picnic shelter and hang on.

Hansen: I heard this train coming. I didn’t see any stars, and it was just kind of a thick night, very comfortable, but it was dark, and so I thought, “What is going on?” This train didn’t seem to be passing. I turned the boat sideways to look upriver behind me to see where this train was coming from, and what I saw against the power plant that was off in the distance was a wall of wind and water. I thought, “Holy crap, this could be a tornado.”

Keller: So that first night, I was clipping along and kind of just in my groove, just totally in the zone. I heard what I thought was a train. And at the moment that I processed “it’s not a train” is when the entire boat just slid like you had brushed it off a tabletop, and I started being pushed towards the riprap [loose stone used to protect shorelines].

Hansen: I had to do a quick 180-degree turn just as the rain started hitting me, and there was this blast of wind. And I raced over to these wing dikes. The wind hit me sideways and almost knocked me over. And I got on the upstream side of it. I grabbed the boat and started lifting it with both hands. It almost took off. I kept hold of it, and I quickly dragged it to the downwind side of the wing dike. I tied it to some boulders as fast as I could, but there was this roaring wind coming in, and rain was extremely heavy. So I put on the rain shells that I had, and I wrap myself up in a space blanket, which is the first time I ever used a space blanket. And I hunker down behind this boulder as this storm rages past me.

Keller: I ended up upside down in the boat. I was getting pushed against that riprap and just thrashed for what seemed like a very long time, upside down. So I rolled the boat to get it righted and yanked the skirt and tried to get out on the riprap. I got out, grabbed the top of the boat, and tried to pull it up enough to get out. I grabbed my phone out of my PFD [personal flotation device]. There was lightning popping everywhere. But I got halfway up the riprap and just put on my foil blanket. I dialed the number on the phone for home. I called my partner, who was being woken up in the middle of the night in North Carolina, and I said, “There’s been some kind of weather event. I am OK — banged up, but OK. I am safe right now. Here’s my location, best I know. Just let them know I’m going to lose my phone. It got wet.” And I got cut off.

Mansker: And then it was over, and it’s pitch-dark. And immediately my phone starts ringing, and it’s somebody from North Carolina calling me. I figure it’s [Keller], but it was actually her partner who was in North Carolina, and she told me, “Hey, Dawn is hurt and needs help. She called me, and she needs somebody to go get her.”

So we had her last mile marker, so I could kind of conjure where she was. And, you know, I’ve got all these other paddlers on the ramp, and they’re like, “You can’t go out there.” There were whitecaps on the river. And I thought, “Well, this is my job. I suspect I will sink the canoe 100 yards off the ramp, but at least I will have done what I’m supposed to do in this moment.” So they helped me pump out the canoe. Eventually, I get to the bend of the river, maybe seven or eight miles downstream, and I see she’s shining a light at me. And I get to her spot, and her [kayak] looked like it had just been thrown up on the riprap and had exploded. Like all the hatches were open. There’s gear everywhere. And she thought her boat was destroyed.

Keller: I was never so happy to see Scott Mansker and that little boat coming down. I was wrapped up in that foil blanket, trying to stay warm. And he pulled up, and he got out and said, “Are you OK?” I said, “I’m banged up, but I’m fine.” I remember vividly the expression on his face. The little millipedes and centipedes that lived in that rocky environment had decided I was warmer than where they were, so when I flipped off that blanket, his light shined, and I had them crawling all over me. I ended up being pretty black and blue everywhere that was not covered by the PFD, but that’s just kind of the nature of the beast if you expedition. I made some minor repairs to the boat, took about three hours to rest, and then set off again.

Hansen: After the storm passed, I stood up and stretched and looked upriver, and there was [Payzant’s] boat sitting in the middle of the river. I thought, “What’s going on here?” So I packed everything together, and I paddled back upriver to his boat. And he roused himself and said, “Hey, I’m stuck on a sandbar.”

Payzant: The boat was just taken by the wind and thrown across the river. At one point, the boat was on its side so that the surface of the water was right by my shoulder. I was going as fast as the engines would go just to stay in one place against the wind. But then at some point, I no longer had control of the boat. I felt like I was going to hit something, and it was going to be rocks. We’re going to come to a fast stop somewhere, so we did, but miraculously, there was a sandbar. So the engines, the outboard motors, stuck in the sand, and that’s what held me.

Hansen: I grabbed my bowline and stowed my paddle and pushed [Payzant’s] boat off of the sandbar — kind of rocked it and rocked it and eventually I got it loose and he was able to continue on downriver. And then I got back in my boat and continued with the race.

Mansker: The sun came up. It’s beautiful. And then slowly I start getting all the texts. Everybody was accounted for. Many people had dropped out, but the forecast looked great. And, you know, we had survived night one.

Part IV: “That Was One of Those Miracles of the River”

After the storm, West Hansen extended his lead, and the paddlers battled fatigue, illness, and the sheer distance.

Fawcett: I was purifying water from the river, which turned out to be just a huge mistake. I probably hadn’t accounted for all the chemical runoff and fertilizers in the river. I ended up pulling out of the river [downstream from the Osage River] and just sitting on a sandbank. I called Scott Mansker to let him know that I couldn’t race. It was 100 degrees outside, and I was sitting on the bank, shivering and just really, really sick.

Mansker: I have a friend. His name’s Soda Popp. He lives about a mile up the Osage River, and he farms some of the bottom land there. I asked him, “Can you go help [Fawcett]?” He’s like, “I’m on my way.” He brought [Fawcett] back to his air-conditioned house and got him comfortable on the couch. But that was another one of those little miracles of the river that we needed that first year. Because despite what I thought was great preparation, I learned quickly that I was woefully unprepared for what would be a 200-mile gap between the last paddlers and the first paddlers, and we definitely addressed that over the next several years.

Hopkins: I was pretty much completely alone, and only saw the other boaters occasionally. You’re telling yourself, “Man, if I can just get to the next boat ramp, maybe then I might pull out.” And, you know, you do question yourself. “Why am I doing this? What is the point of this?” You really begin to wonder about a lot of life’s big questions, and that happens every time.

Edie Jackson (competitor): We sang a lot of songs. In our state of very little sleep, it was very funny. “East Bound and Down” was a fave. “Rock the Boat” by Hues Corp, “Moon River,” and, of course, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” sung in rounds.

Hansen: Just before sun came up, I caught this fog around Hermann. So I pulled over on a wing dike, tied the boat up, and I slept for 24 minutes. I remember I set my watch for 24 minutes. And, man, after 24 minutes, I popped up. I felt like 100 bucks, and I went nonstop after that.

Part V: “Never Quit Anything Until You’ve Had a Snack.”

West Hansen finished first, nearly a full day ahead of the second-place paddlers. All in all, 13 paddlers in 10 boats completed the race.

Payzant: When the winner showed up in St. Charles, I had him stand there on the bank. And when [the competitors] touched the bank, that was their time. So I wrote it down on a piece of legal pad with a magic marker. I had them hold that up, and we took a picture of them. And that was the closing ceremony.

Keller: Someone said, “There’s a couple folks who are pulling off.” They were within 10 miles of the finish. And I was like, “They can’t do that. They’ve come this far.” And so I went back and rallied with those two guys. I found them, started paddling next to them, and I said, “Never quit anything until you’ve had a snack, stretched, and rested out of the boat. Then get back in the boat and decide if you can go again.” They just were so exhausted, and their hands looked like they’d been through a meat grinder. So I said, “Let’s do this. We’re going to tell really bad dad jokes and have a lot of fun, and we’re just going to cruise past the finish line.” And they did.

Jackson: I was so happy to finish that race. We were the last boat, and so everybody was really glad to see us, and they helped us out of the water. And I remember being very excited that we were done. And then it kind of hit me that it was over. This really great experience on the water was done, and I was just kind of overwhelmed with sadness at the end.

Payzant: What I saw was people are capable of much more than they imagined. It was just beyond anything they had ever done, and to see them hold on and complete it and come up the beach. They were magnificent humans.

No one was fatigued more than Scott. He was standing up in a canoe for probably 600 miles, because he would go up and come back and go up and come back. And his feet at the end of it were swollen so much that he couldn’t put his shoes on. I can’t say enough about who we saw out there in Scott Mansker.

Steve Schnarr (current MR340 race director): Missouri has a rich history of paddling on rivers. In fact, one translation of the name “Missouri” is “the people with big canoes.” So the Missouri River is the river of big canoes. But in recent times, until Scott Mansker saw the Missouri River’s potential as an epic endurance paddling racecourse, not many people were paddling on the Missouri River. In the last 20 years, though, the Missouri River paddling community has exploded. More and more people are realizing it’s an awesome place to be. The MR340 is a huge part of that.

Mansker: Race season [in Missouri] is now April to October, with several races dotting the calendar and weekly paddling meetups happening at both ends of the state. We have custom boat builders, paddle makers, car and truck rack manufacturers, all here in the heart of the country and selling their products nationwide.

But the best part is all the friendships. There are no better people than river and boat people. Almost everyone I know, I can trace our friendship back to a chance meeting at a race or a cleanup or some sort of river gathering. The river is our common friend. The one who thought we ought to meet and so introduced us. And it just keeps happening. So I keep showing up!

Author: Dean Klinkenberg is a contributor to Terrain.

Top image: Competitors in the first MR340 set off from Kansas City, Kansas. (Dave Marner)