June 24th, 2008 - The Gallatin River is raging through the canyon just north of Big Sky, and dozens of riverboarders are plunging through the huge raves and chaotic rapids on what appear to be oversize boogie boards.

It's just one section of "the world's most challenging human endurance race", but River Director Josh Galt hopes it will be one of the highlights of the course.

"It's just below flood stage" he says with a gleam in his eye. "But it's totally safe, just huge waves - racers who have the right gear and boards will do great."

And that's where Mean Monkey Sports stepped up in a huge way. With Riverboarding still a fairly new sport in the US (it's been around for a couple decades and is popular in Europe and New Zealand, where it is often called Hydrospeed), not a lot of adventure racers owned boards.

Many of the racers planned to use cheap boogie boards, which Galt strongly encouraged them not to do.

"A lot of teams were expecting this to be a flatwater swim, like Utah in 2006" Galt said. "This is a completely different animal, and since I've been tasked with safety on the river, racers need to have the right kind of boards."

Planning ahead, Galt spoke with Mean Monkey owner Matt Kuntz, a native of Montana who had just gotten the first of the Mean Monkey inflatables into the US. Would he be willing to rent boards to racers who showed up with inadequate riverboards? Kuntz said yes, definitely, and made the delivery. (Between purchased boards and rented ones, there were over 30 Mean Monkey riverboards on the water for PQ.)

The prototype boards had been tested in big water and under harsh conditions, notably by the Nile River Guides on the White Nile in Uganda, and by Galt and Kuntz in blizzard-like conditions in Madison Canyon. But these boards were fresh out of production, and were going to be getting their first run on the cold, flooded conditions of the Gallatin...in the middle of the world's biggest adventure race.

"I was a little bit nervous about that" says Matt. "But it looks like the boards are holding up really well, which is great."

Indeed they are. As the racers come down and walk around "House Rock", a gnarly house-sized boulder creating a massive hydraulic at this flow which Galt made a mandatory portage for teams, a racer calls out to him.

"Thanks for these Mean Monkeys!" the racer says. "We have been blowing by teams with other boards, they're kicking so hard and we just sail by. These things are fast!"

For Matt Kuntz, it's years of hard work coming to fruition, and he can't stop smiling and taking pictures.

"This is so great" he says, a huge smile on his face. "This is great for the sport, and it's so cool to see all these boards out here."

It's only a matter of moments before another team comes through with the silver and black boards, knifing through waves that tower overhead.  Matt keeps snapping pictures, while Galt watches.

"It was huge for Mean Monkey to come through with all these boards" Galt says. "I had to talk a lot of teams out of their Wal*Mart boogie boards, but now they're glad I did, and it has made this whole section a lot safer to have people on real riverboards."

Not to mention, from the faces of the racers using the Mean Monkey Riverboards, a whole lot more fun.

photo by Wouter Kingma