ON A SUNNY, crisp morning, we pushed off from Schafer Meadows and headed downstream. Ken and Adam and I were in kayaks; Nate was rowing one of the rafts. The rest consisted of Damon Yerkes, 46, another former Outward Bound guide, who owns a gear shop in Donnelly, Idaho; Tiff Barton, 36, who'd managed OB's Baja sea-kayaking program; Doug Pollock, 40, who after many years at OB lives in Denver with his wife and daughter; and Bruce Allen, 45, a former Glacier National Park ranger who builds cabinets in Missoula.

The river was fast and bony and the rafts kept getting hung up. Nate missed a move and found himself stuck in a channel blocked by a downed log. After some negotiation we tied a rope to the log and yarded on it until we could slide the raft underneath and continue on. We ate lunch on a cobble beach, lying out on warm rocks. "Where is everybody?" Nate asked. We wouldn't see another person for the entire three days.

By afternoon the clouds had returned and a steady rain had started, one that would last for 24 hours. The river got wider and deeper; we saw fewer exposed rocks and more crashing waves, and there were long deep stretches where the current surged between swirling eddies on either side. We found a good camp and stretched a tarp and huddled around the stove, spiking the hot chocolate with Kahlúa and vodka. Adam slipped into the gorilla suit. "For warmth," he said.

Adam has a nonironic zeal for the timeworn symbols of manliness (pickups, guns, flasks) combined with a wholehearted love of corny jokes, and if this circus had a ringleader, he was it. Adam and Nate and I had gone through instructor training together at the Colorado Outward Bound School in 1996. While many of us were there to acquire something called "leadership skills," Adam seemed to have been born with them. He'd already been teaching kayaking for ten years and had a confidence and serenity that I would later attribute to his Quaker upbringing. He could look the most hapless, awkward teenager in the eyes and say, "I know you can do this," and actually mean it. As the Quakers say, he knew how to hold someone in the light.

Nate was already 30 then. Between owning his own hardwood-flooring business in Denver and marrying his girlfriend, he was past the point of thinking that taking kids into the woods would be a viable career. He saw it as a way to have fun. Nate is an old-fashioned surly New Englander; he plays hockey, builds boats, and has never used e-mail in his life. Over the years, he's picked up the nickname All-Man.

Ken is the only one of us who actually grew up in the country, tramping the Wisconsin woods with a gun and a dog and a fishing pole. He's one of those people who seems to be good at all useful tasks, from catching fish to telemark skiing to fixing broken lawnmowers. But you can't really pin him down. On one hand, every fall he's out hunting with his bird dog, Bubba; on the other, he has a degree from an art school.

From Utah, we were promoted to Alaska and Baja. It was almost more freedom than we could bear: dispatched to Mexico with a fleet of Ford F-350's and more gringo dollars than you could hope to spend in places like Loreto and La Paz. Every fall we'd drive the rigs from Moab down to Loreto, then come back in the spring. The truckbeds were piled high with hardtack crackers and peanut butter, and the drivers packed a stack of girlie mags to hand out at narcotráfico checkpoints so the teenage guards with their machine guns might let us pass undisturbed.

But ultimately the dirt in our food and the dust in our teeth got tiresome. Adam convinced one of his former students—an attorney in San Francisco—to quit her job and spend the summer hanging around trailers while he finished up with Outward Bound. Then they moved to Missoula and got married and the next thing we knew he'd cut his hair and shaved his face and enrolled in law school. Meanwhile, Ken was still logging more than 250 field days a year, a feat made possible by the fact that he was often paired with his girlfriend, a Canadian instructor. When her work permit expired, Ken hustled her down to the Moab courthouse and married her. With Adam's urging, they came up to Missoula. Nate followed in 2003.

I was the final holdout. That year I finished my last Alaska Outward Bound course and went east to work on a presidential campaign. We lost, and when my sublet expired and I faced the specter of buying furniture, I flinched—and succumbed to the tractor beam from Montana. After all, my friends were there.