Gallatin River Rafting

The Gallatin is a 120-mile-long river that rises from the northwestern corner of Yellowstone National Park, dropping from the sweeping alpine meadows that are the park’s hallmark into the flatter, lower-lying Gallatin Valley between Big Sky and Bozeman. Parts of Robert Redford’s 1992 movie A River Runs Through It were filmed here, which should give you a sense of the river’s sweeping scale and scenery. The prize whitewater stretch is a relatively short charge through Gallatin Canyon, traced by U.S. Highway 191 running between West Yellowstone and Bozeman. Outfitters here tackle a burst of Class III+ rapids nourished with the late-spring snowmelt from the Yellowstone-Teton catchment. The pick of these rapids is the Mad Mile, a near-continuous gauntlet of big whitewater. Unsurprisingly, given the river’s starring role in the Brad Pitt fly-fishing epic, the Gallatin offers some trophy trout fishing as the river winds northwest towards Three Forks, Montana. There it converges with the Jefferson and Madison rivers to form the Missouri.