My First Time: Bill Zell
Catching up with a river rat.
The river and its whitewater can stop boaters in their tracks. It pushes limits and makes stomachs turn. It connects people with its wild and resilient nature. But usually, by the end of the day, it smears ear-to-ear smiles across every face in the boat. Bill Zell, more commonly known as “Wild Bill,” has dedicated his life to the river and sharing those smiles with as many folks as possible.
Growing up, Bill was all over the map—from Hong Kong and France to the coasts of New York and California. He made his way to Montana in 1991, changing diapers at the Big Sky Resort daycare during winter, and guiding for Yellowstone Raft Company when the snow melted. The following year, he started Montana Whitewater. What began as a two-man operation has since burgeoned into a booming enterprise. While Bill’s name is well-respected across southwest Montana, he hasn’t always been the whitewater guru we see today. Recently, we caught up with Bill to ask about how he got into river-running in the first place.
Tell us Bill, about your first experience running whitewater.
Well, it’s not that exciting. In my early 20s, I spent the summers guiding 36- to 50-day canoe trips in Canada. Back then, there were no cell phones, satellite phones, or GPS units. We were off on our own—usually two guides and seven kids. Our trips were north of Ontario, in the Quebec area. We would pick a route and say “Hey, in two weeks we’ll be at this spot” and a plane would fly in and we’d re-ration. Due to the remote nature of the trips, we were not allowed to paddle any whitewater.
On one particular trip, we had a three-boat flotilla of 16-foot Grumman canoes on the Spanish River. The canoes were made from aluminum and were not meant for whitewater. But partway through the trip, a section of river caught our eyes with a really cool, huge drop. The other guide and I turned to each other and said, “Let’s run this stuff!” We weren’t supposed to, but we decided to anyway.
We brought the canoe to shore and jumped up and down on it to bend the metal back into shape.
So, we took the canoe through. I’ll never forget this—the guy in front was totally submerged. We really should not have been running it; we got fairly worked. We surfaced and swam ashore, but the canoe didn’t come up. We were down to nine people and two canoes… that wasn’t going to work. Plus, there was nobody else out there.
The canoe ended up resurfacing ten minutes later with an 18-inch gash in the metal and the gunwales all twisted. We brought it to shore and jumped up and down on it to bend the metal back into shape. We primarily used open fires to cook on those trips, but we had a few gas stoves stowed away. My repair kit also had aluminum tape, so we used the gas stove to heat the tape and melted it into the gouges and rips in the canoe. We were able to get the thing back into paddling shape. We ran some smaller Class I and II rapids after that, but nothing compared to the big one.
The camp administration wasn't very happy about the situation.
After that experience I thought, whoa, this is really fun, but I really didn’t know what I was doing. The other guides and I said to the camp administration: “You should teach us a few things about whitewater.” They weren’t very happy about the situation, but at the end of the day, the boat got fixed and no one was hurt.
That trip is ultimately what propelled me to whitewater. I was then drawn to the West. It has more continuous whitewater than anywhere else. Idaho’s Middle and Main Salmon; all the rivers in the southwest—the Green, the Colorado—and countless others. But as far as inspiration goes, paddling that rapid in Canada is what sealed the deal.
