THE GORGE — Matt Marx and family plan will float from Idaho to the sea, connecting with people and documenting the issues facing a polluted river on the route taken by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805.
“It’s kind of a fun adventure in modern day, versus they had to — their life depended on it,” he said. He looks forward to relaxing with his family, to letting time slow down for a couple of weeks.
Marx has been gathering material more than a year, and preparing since spring.
The half-done raft awaits its destiny in a White Salmon field.
F. Martin Gibson photo
Marx’s wife, born and raised in Underwood, is a Native American from the Yurok tribe located in Klamath, California. “Her tribe fought for 20-30 years for the removal of four dams and successfully removed the last dam in August 2024. It was the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. A huge victory for the Yurok and the salmon,” Marx said.
His grandmother descended from William Clark. His brother, researching her maiden name, ignited Matt’s interest in retracing his ancestor’s route down the Columbia.
Instead of Lewis and Clark’s five beat-up canoes, Matt’s hand-making a log raft to float in comfort “with a little more modern touch, yet still rustic.”
He designed the 30-by-60 foot raft, “Dreams Adrift,” from salvaged fir logs and 81 plastic barrels to carry two tepees, a tent, cook shack, supplies, a sawdust composting toilet and a small working shower. Marx works in lumber: Half-built equipment, water barrels and tools cover his lawn and sawhorses of tepee poles await trimming all over his White Salmon yard.
Marx has found, recycled, or built most of his own equipment. All he’ll need to buy for the raft is plywood for the surface. He even repaired a canoe he found in the ditch near Trout Lake, adorned with rotting gunwales and a “FREE” sign.
Marx explains sanitation on a raft: composting toilet using sawdust and hand-made 5-gallon shower facilities.
F. Martin Gibson photo
For navigation, he’s got maps and a marine radio powered by a solar panel. To keep the raft moving, he’s salvaged paddles, sails, rudders and a big bag to catch the current in.
“My bad weather is going to be the west wind,” he said. The raft sits low in the water, so high waves might not be fun, but he’s designed the raft with overlapped joints so it can flex with the waves. It’s Matt’s first big raft trip.
To get through the locks on each of eight dams, he needs a motorized vessel. So Matt’s bringing motors off his own boats and from yard sales.
The family won’t need to leave the raft except to restock food and water. But he hopes to meet locals on the way, learn more about the issues facing the Columbia and raise awareness for them. A gathering of biologists and other experts will meet him on the way, hopping on for interviews.
Marx also made some items to trade, in the spirit of Lewis and Clark’s 1805 ventures. “Making new acquaintance and new trade was what the original thing was for ... but obviously, if they could look back on it — or look ahead — they probably wouldn’t have done it.”
He clarified, “If you were taking off from St. Louis and you could fast forward 220 years ...? I’d probably say, ‘No, I don’t want to wreck it.’”
He wonders what would happen if the Northwest had been settled a hundred years more slowly. “Population is what ruins everything ... Just natural to wreck everything. I mean, we gotta have a certain type of shoe — we gotta have plastic glasses — everything you think of, how does that get here? Population. That’s how it gets there.”
Marx shows off a canoe he salvaged from the ditch near Trout Lake and adorned with a bald eagle figurehead.
F. Martin Gibson photo
Asked how he reconciles the uglier parts of the past and present, Marx said, “It’s like, my family wasn’t part of it. I’m here, just living, breathing same oxygen you’re breathing. Yes, we’re just enjoying the same area. It’s really, really sad to see what our government has done to everybody over the years ... all you got to do is go online or open up a history book. It’s a hot mess. I mean, do I agree with all that? No. Can I change any of it? No. But what can I do on my trip?
“We’ll see ... Everybody shares this river and this gorge and the Snake River, and we can just stop going backwards and just hold steady and go maybe a little forwards every year ... There’s so much stuff that’s out there wrecking this river right now.”
He’s looking into sea lions (once watching a sea lion rip a sturgeon open to eat its eggs below The Dalles Dam), non-native salmon-eating fish like bass, pikeminnow and other “trash fish,” the decades of pollution from Hanford and Bradford settling into decades of trapped mud behind those eight dams, and “a metric shit-ton” of invasive seaweed and poisonous cyanobacteria.
So he’s “going off social media, to actually go down the river and just experience what we have and document it myself, just like they did.”
Videos, photography and stories from the raft will be online at www.lewisandclarkquest.com, later becoming a full-length documentary.
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