If Not for Surfing, We Ain’t Hunting.

How an aimless road trip through the American West led me to a subculture of Montana river surfers

As Dylan pulled off the side of the dirt road the temperature gauge on his dashboard read 10 degrees. We opened the doors to his Tundra quietly, lowered his tailgate slowly, with finesse. I put on my blaze orange vest, strapped my pack, and loaded my rifle, metal sliding on metal, making the sound of a satisfying knuckle crack as the action slid into place. From a distance, an onlooker might have seen a competent hunter setting out for the day.

“I need to take a shit,” I whispered to Dylan. I grabbed a few tickets of toilet paper and a lighter and waddled away. I found a spot behind a bush, and, as soon as my pants were around my ankles and I relaxed enough to admire the moon, it hit me that I had forgotten my bear spray back at the truck. 

“How did he die?” my surfer buddies back in California might ask. I could only hope that Dylan would spare them the gooey details. “He died while hunting in Montana.” Leave the rest up to imagination.

About a year prior, I’d bought a 1997 Ford RV and took a solo road trip through Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. I was posting photos of my journey (fucking millennials) when one day someone named Dylan Snyder messaged me. His profile was a grid of photos almost exclusively of river surfing. I had heard of this obscure form of wave riding but never tried it. So when Dylan offered to lend me a board and take me to his local river wave in Missoula, I put it on my meandering agenda. A couple weeks later, I pulled my RV into a dirt parking lot where I fell into a subculture of Montana river surfers. But more on that later.

Dylan offered to take me on a Public Lands hunt if I ever returned to Missoula. And that’s how I ended up here, one year later, popping a squat in Montana. I covered my business with a hefty rock and walked back to the truck. 

We were accompanied by Paige Maul, a sturdy 27-year old who wore a flannel and beanie. Dylan and Paige have been friends since they were kids: hunting, ice hockey and eventually surfing.

I followed them along the dirt road. They didn’t look down at their feet when they walked, instead they looked ahead, scanning. Every step was a new landscape, a new possibility to see an animal. The first signs of dawn were upon us and wispy clouds were now visible high above. I reached for the nipple of my camel pack and tried to suck some water, but it was frozen solid. We turned off the road onto a steep hill amidst a thicket of ponderosa pines and I dug my boots into the soft earth, finding my footing. I was walking fast, too fast, and as I approached the mountain’s first saddle, a whitetail deer scampered off into the thicket.

“Fuck,” I mouthed to Dylan. 

Dylan Snyder, Montana Public Lands.

We sat down and started glassing. “Glassing” is the term for methodically scanning a landscape with binoculars and it’s a foundational hunting skill. Although it’s not showcased on hunting highlight-reels, an inordinate chunk of the hunting experience is spent sitting on your ass, looking for some branch in the distance that suddenly flicks its tail.

Dylan pulled out a small bottle of talcum powder and squeezed it. The chalky dust puffed into the air, then drifted down the hill. This would determine our path forward. It’s called getting “winded,” when an animal smells your body odor. Elk and deer have keen senses of smell, and if you’re walking with the wind at your back, blowing your human stench toward the animals, they’ll be gone faster than you can say, “Busted.”

“This used to be a prehistoric glacial lake,” said Dylan as we stopped high on the mountain to eat breakfast later that morning. “Lake Missoula. It was created by an ice dam.” 

The Missoula wilderness is made of thick forests, scenic lakes, high peaks and open cliff-banded slopes, which swoop out across the greater Montana horizon. A sinuous highway and smokey slash piles are the only evidence of human activity, at least to my untrained eyes. As I looked across the valley, vast sections of the forest had exploded to the burnt orange colors of fall, while much of the forest clung to the verdant greens of summer. I hadn’t been in this kind of nature for over a year. 

I’ve been hunting off and on for the past few years. Deer hunts in Hawaii, wild boar hunts in Central California, and turkey hunts at home in Santa Cruz. My problem is that, much like dancing, I don’t do it frequently enough to improve my repertoire, so when I do go, I’m only reminded of how badly I suck. But the simple fact that I didn’t grow up hunting—didn’t even know anyone who hunted— keeps it novel, fresh, and a bit romantic. Creeping through the wilderness, rifle in hand and a knife at my belt, is about as macho as my dainty ass has ever felt. 

Surf Shack in the Mountains

We didn’t see another animal for the remainder of the day and that night we drove back to Dylan’s house in Missoula. It was warm and peppered with dog hair. A hockey game played on TV. We slid our rifles into soft cases and leaned them against Dylan’s book shelf, which included The Doors of Perception, Sex At Dawn, Barbarian Days, and American Buffalo—books about consciousness, relationships, surfing and hunting. Dylan was in his late twenties, had a scruffy beard and long, curly, jet black hair.  When I first met him, I thought he hated me—then I realized he's just comfortable with silence.

Dylan led me out his backdoor and into his garage, which he had retrofitted into a professional-grade surfboard shaping room.

“Dude, this is awesome.” I said. “Did you do this all yourself?”

“My dad helped.”

I’d gone river surfing with him the previous year, but this was the first time I’d seen his shaping room. It looked every bit as pro as the shaping rooms I grew up around in Santa Cruz. He had a planer to cut down the thickness of the board, a centerline ruler, sanding blocks, and blue painted walls. While shaping a white surfboard, the blue backdrop allow for better visibility when sanding the subtle contours of the rail.

“This is a 7’2 I shaped.” He said, fondling the freshly glassed rails. "The majority of our surfing happens April through June, but honestly I go until ice sheets start floating down the river.” 

Dylan Snyder and Paige Maul. The shack.

I’m both amused and confused by Dylan’s obsession with surfing. He grew up in Arlee, a town of 600 people 30 miles outside Missoula on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Dylan was one of the few white kids on the land. Besides a brief hiatus in college, his life has been filled with hunting, fly fishing and ice hockey. Not exactly a life destined for surf. And yet, he clearly is a surfer. Complete with Vans, blue jeans, and a black and yellow checkered flannel. He keeps up with all the latest happenings in surf culture—a hell of a lot more than I do—and as I walked around this shaping shack, the familiar smell of resin in the air, it was easy to forget that I was a 15-hour drive from the nearest ocean.

Last year Dylan was riding a stubby little board when he took me to his local river wave. It’s called Zero. The waves tend to break where the river banks move toward each other in the shape of a V, the squeezing of the river walls creates a wave train—a series of breaking rapids down the center of the river. A surfer stands on the edge of the bank, jumps, ferries across a couple of seams of whitewater on his or her stomach, and, when in the center of the rapid, pops up and slashes the flowing canvas. The strangest part of riding a river wave is the view. When I finally mustered the confidence to unglue my eyes from the nose of my board and look upstream, I saw a powerful river rushing toward me, yet I was standing in place. It felt like I was breathing in my visual field.

Dylan on his own hand-shaped surfboard. Photo: Dave Gardner

Since I was 10 years old, I’ve dedicated a good chunk of calories to surfing. This wasn’t hard growing up in Santa Cruz, a city on the edge of coastal redwoods about an hour south of San Francisco. It’s a place where to be a surfer is to be a leaf flowing down a stream—effortless, but hard to escape. 

Just before my 30th birthday, I sort of freaked out. I abruptly ended my eight-year relationship with my girlfriend. (“Unskillfully” my mom would later note.) I drained my savings to buy an epic old RV named Starflyte and spent four months on the road, driving through the Mountain West. Initially I was planning to stay in Colorado for two weeks, then drive home. But I didn’t have a full-time job and the thought of returning to Santa Cruz, the thought of returning to anything familiar, felt like returning to Chernobyl right after the blast. This is embarrassing to admit, but it was my longest stint away from Santa Cruz, and the ocean, in my entire life. 

The trip was marked by manic swings between freedom and loss. Elation and depression. I committed to a year of no alcohol because I was afraid of spiraling on a lonely bender. I spent time in Crestone, Salida, Crested Butte, Laramee, Wind River, Jackson, Big Sky, Bozeman, Livingston, Whitefish and Missoula.

Rivers are a central feature of many towns in the non-coastal American West, and I made a habit of cold plunging. I would peel my socks off and wade into rivers, my toes slipping across the mossy cobblestone rocks until I was waist deep. Goosebumps erupting on my arms. I would crane my head to the snow-capped mountains, gulp the mountain air, hurl myself underwater, grab a large rock, and let the momentum of the river sweep my legs out from under me. Except for my gripping hands, I was weightless. At first, the muscles in my face bore down, squinting eyes and clenched teeth. But after a while, my face relaxed, my heart slowed, my grip softened, and I let go. 

As I stood in Dylan’s shaping shack and went to sleep that night, memories of the prior summer flooded in. 

Friendly, But Standoffish.

The next morning my alarm sounded at 4 a.m. and as I walked downstairs I heard the slosh of rain outside along with the creaking door as Paige walked in the house. Paige had been to a Halloween costume party the night prior and was running on about an hour of sleep, but as we set out for the day, he was as chipper as a mallard on a bright morning.

“Hypothermia weather,” Dylan said as we drove to a new spot. Dylan made sure that I wasn’t wearing any cotton, a material that doesn’t dry easily. “Cotton kills” as the saying goes. A hunter will get wet. Get lost.  Die. In hunting, as in surfing, the publicized dangers aren’t the ones that will end you. I fear slippery rocks and shallow reefs far more than I fear sharks.

As we drove I watched rain drops crawl across the window. We passed a dead buck on the side of the road, the headlights causing his glassy eyes to flash white before fading into darkness. 

Paige directed Dylan up a nondescript dirt road around the greater Missoula area. Straight out of high school Paige became a wild land firefighter for the Forest Service.

“Have you been reading anything lately?” I asked Paige. 

“I just finished 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson.” 

“What’d you get out of it?” 

“Mostly to stop being a little bitch.”

When I asked Paige and Dylan how they would describe people from Montana, Paige said, “I went to school with a foreign exchange student who said people from Montana are like people from Basque country—friendly, but standoffish.”

“Yup,” Dylan laughed. “I’d say that’s me.” 

We arrived at the new spot, threw on our rain gear, and less than an hour in, Dylan spotted a herd of elk. I could have sworn I scoured the section, but the elk blended in so well I skipped right over them. I cupped my eyes to the binoculars, my lashes brushing against the curved glass. The animals were massive. Their powerful, athletic builds made them look like deer who started taking steroids and training at Gold’s Gym. I’ve only seen wild elk a few times in my life, and their size reminds me that the hunting term, “Fill your freezer,” is not hyperbole. Hunters often say that when you harvest one of these animals, the work has just begun. After they’ve killed and quartered an elk, it takes two or three hunters multiple trips to pack out all the meat.

As my eyes moved from one elk to the next, I could see that they were all cows (females), so this was a “look but don’t touch” scenario. We watched the herd quarter away from us down the left side of the mountain, then disappear into the pines.

An hour or so later, the muted patter of rain let up. Fires had decimated Montana the year prior, and although the dry forests’ thirst was far from quenched, it did feel like it dropped its shoulder (branches) a few inches and let out a relieved sigh. We hiked to a new saddle on the mountain and continued to glass. 

“All this rain could be good for Zero,” Dylan said. Dylan and Paige use an app, similar to Surfline, but it measures cubic feet per second of water flowing down a river at any given time.

Dylan tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to get down. I did. About 150 yards away a whitetail buck stood in the distance, disappearing in and out of trees, a broad and stately figure unaware of our presence. I laid my pack down and crept around the side of the hill, working for a clearer shot. As I did, my heartrate shot into my temples, the way it does during big wave sessions. I consciously breathed through my nose as slowly as possible, rested my shoulder against a tree, and peered through the scope. This was the final day of hunting, likely my last shot at an animal before flying home the next day. Slowly, I panned from left to right. Where is he? There was a rustle in the distance. Nothing. I waited a while longer. Still nothing.

I walked back to Dylan and Paige, dejected.

We hunted for the rest of the afternoon with no luck, and as the final shafts of light dropped behind the mountains and the smell of fresh rain covered the earth, we walked back to Dylan’s truck. Paige decided to set off on his own for the final hour and as we waited for him to return, we lowered the tailgate and Dylan and I sat on it together. I slugged some water and stared at the intoxicating landscape. A failed hunt, but certainly not a failed trip.

“There’s always next year,” Dylan offered. 

“Thanks man, I appreciate that,” I said. I slugged some more water and asked, “Do you hunt every year?”

“No, I stopped during college,” he said. “When I left home I got really into partying. Drinking. Pills. It wasn’t good. I grew up playing ice hockey, so when the season ended I was like, ‘Great, now I can party all the time’ … I sort of spiraled into depression.” 

We heard footsteps in the distance. The muffled crunch of boots on deadfall. Paige appeared, rifle slung over his shoulder, looking chipper and steady as always.

“I was living with Paige at the time and one day called me,” Dylan continued. “Told me he was gonna try surfing. I didn’t have anything better to do so I drove down to the wave. I didn’t go surfing, I went swimming. But on the drive back I wasn’t depressed anymore. So I started surfing every day. It helped me get out of that dark place.” 

Dylan looked at his childhood friend as he approached the truck, shook his head, then turned to me. 

“If not for surfing, we ain’t hunting.”

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Listen to my podcast with Dylan and Paige here. Check out Dylan’s hand-shaped surfboards here.