GALLATIN CANYON, Montana — The House Rock section of the Gallatin River is to whitewater kayaking what Teton Pass is to powder skiing or Moab is to mountain biking.
It’s a foundational proving ground for boaters who build their skills on the Gallatin before applying them on the most demanding stretches of whitewater in the world.
Highwater season on the House Rock section runs from late May into early June. Locals make sport out of trying to predict when the river will rise enough to spill over House Rock, which sits monolithically midstream atop a long nonstop stretch of challenging rapids.
Anna Schehrer and Travis Lehman threw their boats on Schehrer’s 2000 Toyota Tacoma on Thursday and drove up to the river after work.
All day, news about a giant log blocking the left channel at House Rock circulated.
The river was running around 3,200 cubic feet per second (cfs) and the water splashed about halfway up House Rock. Volunteers attacked the problem, hooking a truck winch to the massive log and slashing at it with chainsaws as the river roared past.
By the time a crowd of after-work boaters reached House Rock, the channel was clear and the boaters cheered gleefully as they paddled past.
Removing the log allowed Schehrer and Lehman to continue their annual early season conditioning. The House Rock run is demanding enough to push expert boaters but forgiving enough to be a great place to practice whitewater skills.
“There’s a lot of class five runs around here,” said Lehman, noting Bozeman’s proximity to many extreme, experts-only runs.
“You're pretty safe,” continued Lehman, talking about how he can sometimes intuitively sense the rising and falling cfs on the river. He’ll run it as low as 500 cfs or when it’s running much, much higher.
“Paddled it at 9 grand,” said Lehman, referring to the extreme, 9,000 cfs flood conditions experienced in 2022, when places like Yellowstone National Park and Red Lodge, Montana, experienced catastrophic floods.
“We were kayaking it a lot and everyone was getting mad because they thought we were putting everyone at risk,” said Lehman, remembering how some questioned the wisdom of paddling the Gallatin at flood stage.
“But in the end, it was chill,” said Lehman.
“All our friends kayak and it’s easy to go do,” added Schehrer, explaining the allure of the House Rock run. “Everyone is stoked. Especially when the water is coming up.”
A boater paddles past House Rock, the most notable feature on a popular stretch of whitewater outside Bozeman, Montana, in the Gallatin Canyon. (David Madison, Cowboy State Daily) 
Travis Lehman and Anna Schehrer stop in at Stacey's after a run past House Rock. (David Madison, Cowboy State Daily) 
The whitewater community rallies to remove a dangerous log jam at House Rock on May 29. (Zach Dewell) 
Former kayaker and class five whitewater storyteller Ben Baker. (David Madison, Cowboy State Daily) 
The "perfect" kayak truck, a 2000 Toyota Tacoma, driven by Bozeman boater Anna Schehrer and parked outside popular boater bar Stacey's in Gallatin Gateway. (David Madison, Cowboy State Daily)
Parental Stoke
Since the 1970s, parents have used the House Rock section of the Gallatin River as a classroom for their water-loving kids.
“I headed to the Gallatin in May,” recalled Mike Garcia about his first days as a whitewater kayaker in a 2022 essay for Outside Bozeman Magazine titled “My First Time.”
Garcia went on to open a kayak store and father three sons, “All of whom are accomplished whitewater paddlers.”
Evan Garcia remains one of the most influential figures in whitewater kayaking, known for pushing the boundaries as a big waterfall paddler, expedition kayaker and downriver racer.
He first rose to prominence after winning the Freestyle Kayaking World Championships in Canada in 2007.
And like a lot of local kids drawn to the water, he cut his teeth paddling past House Rock.
Standing above House Rock as the Gallatin River shot by on Thursday evening was Kevin Fletcher, who was scouting the run, double checking the flow and looking for any stray pieces of the log his friends helped remove.
Fletcher said his best House Rock story happened when a friend at work showed him a video of kayakers paddling over a submerged House Rock at peak water back in 2022.
Fletcher smiled and said, “That’s my son.”
Alec Fletcher is an aspiring professional kayaker sponsored by Pyranha Kayaks, a boat manufacturer.
“Right now, he's just traveling all over the West, dropping 70-foot waterfalls and going up to Alaska,” said Kevin. “And he just got back from New Zealand.
“Last year, I went out to film him and I was like, ‘Really, you guys are running this,’” remembered Kevin about a kayaking trip to some aggressive drops in Idaho. “So eventually, I got to the point where I'm like, ‘OK, now I'm nervous.’”
Third Place?
Ben Baker hasn’t been in a kayak since 2014, but the sport was life-changing for him when he was in his 20s.
Back in Atlanta on a hot day in 1996, he was drawn into a kayak store where the classic film “Southern Fried Creekin’” was playing on VHS. It was the first film to feature whitewater adventurers descending expert creek runs in the Southern Appalachians.
Baker asked, “What’s that?” not knowing the answer — whitewater kayaking — would forever change his life.
“When I started, I basically dropped off the face of the earth, lost my girlfriend, almost lost my business and went kayaking,” said Baker, whose family owns a cabin up Storm Castle Creek, a tributary to the Gallatin.
The confluence is just downstream from House Rock, so Baker likes to drive up to the pullout and stare at the highwater.
Amid the watery white noise of 3,200 cfs crashing past, Baker offered the play-by-play of his performance in the Gallatin Whitewater Rodeo in 2000. Rodeo kayakers paddle into recirculating rapids and perform tricks like cartwheels and front flips.
The event drew some of the best freestyle rodeo kayakers in the world, along with locals like Baker whose wife is from Bozeman.
Baker said he was at the top of his game, got lucky with a few moves during competition and came away pleased with his performance, but figured he was done for the day. He then nonchalantly paddled downstream, past House Rock, toward the takeout by his cabin.
“We went down and started grilling hamburgers and hotdogs, didn’t think anything of it,” remembered Baker. “Then one after another, other boaters started showing up saying, ‘Dude, where did you go? You placed third. You qualified for the finals. They were calling your name for like five minutes.’”
Baker continued to boat with some of the best in the world, including the Bozeman crew that researched and published “Montana Surf” in 2001, the class whitewater guide. It includes details about “The Gambler,” a rapid on Big Timber Creek in the Crazy Mountains where the hydraulics can trap boats and boaters.
Baker said he popped through The Gambler with ease, but others needed rescue with a safety rope.
Rapid Math
The U.S. Geological Survey operates the Wyoming-Montana Water Science Center in Cheyenne.
The center maintains a database on the Gallatin River that goes back more than 100 years.
Cheryl Eddy Miller, acting associate center director, told Cowboy State Daily on Friday that the numbers show the House Rock section of the Gallatin swelling toward a peak sometime soon.
“It’s our nighttime temperatures above freezing that allows it to continue,” said Miller, explaining what’s behind the continuously rising water on the Gallatin the past few days.
The Gallatin Canyon around House Rock is where memorable fly-fishing scenes from the film “A River Runs Through It” were shot. At fly shops up and down the canyon, guides try to guess the exact day the Gallatin will crest each spring, and at what specific cfs.
Fishing guides want the surge of water to come and go quickly so the flow is just right for catching trout.
Their guess work is no match for Miller, USGS data and the National Weather Service, which predicts June 3 as the day the Gallatin will crest. Will it be enough to cover House Rock? That’s not clear from the data, said Miller.
Miller noted the epic flood conditions in 2022 were caused by rain falling on snow upstream, where the Gallatin’s headwaters drain the northwest corner of Yellowstone National Park.
“It’s a tricky, dynamic system,” said Miller, describing all the inputs that go into highwater season: Snow melting into tributaries at a rate determined by the amount of sunlight or cloud cover. Then there’s what happens underwater.
“You could have stuff moving underneath the water,” noted Miller, explaining how highwater can reset the House Rock section of the Gallatin.
“Boaters are always like, ‘This wave train doesn’t look like it used to,’” said Miller.
Highwater pushes around the boulders in the river, and “you might get different wave trains or you might get different features covered up,” she said.
Boater Bar
When Baker left his cabin on Thursday evening, he pulled onto the highway and fell in behind Schehrer and Lehman, in the 2000 Toyota Tacoma.
“That’s the perfect kayaking truck,” sighed Baker, again pulled back into memories about his kayaking days. “I had a 1997 just like that.”
Baker wasn’t surprised to see Schehrer and Lehman were also headed to Stacey’s, a classic western bar dedicated to traditional rodeo riders, but frequented by those with whitewater rodeo experience.
Local legend Brenna Kelleher, whose father Kevin introduced her to the Gallatin, was the 2001 Junior World Champion in freestyle kayaking and spent nine years competing on the United States Freestyle Kayak Team.
The list goes on, said Baker, comparing the House Rock section of the Gallatin to the Ocoee River in Tennessee, which put whitewater rodeo athletes into the spotlight for the first time around the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Baker projects a charming Southern drawl as he ticks through memories of House Rock. Like everyone else with a connection to this stretch of water, Baker has a story from 2022.
He pulls out his phone and starts showing a video he shot from shore as somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 cfs of water roared over the giant boulder that spends most of the time above water.
Baker studied the video closely and determined, with an air of nostalgia and glee, that if a person was bold enough to try and paddle over the submerged House Rock at this stage, they would be in for a ride.
The video showed House Rock kicking up a wall of angry brown water. It looked like a “grippy” hydraulic formed on the downstream side.
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
