Four Days on the Smith River: VTI Values Meet Montana Canyon Country
- Jun 23
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 24
Written by: Grace
This spring, five of us from VTI Aerospace (Tommy, Cullen, Eric, William, and I) traded our screens for river rafts, spending four days floating Montana's Smith River through national forest land, private ranches, sheep farms, and ancient canyon walls. For some of the team, this was a returning tradition. For me, it was a first.
The Smith River is not easy to get to. There's developed infrastructure (boat ramps, gravel roads), but it sits squarely in the middle of Montana, and access requires winning a permit lottery managed by Montana Fish & Wildlife. That process keeps the canyon quiet, uncrowded, and wild. For over 59 miles of float, we passed through landscapes that felt incredibly unique. We witnessed wide grassy bends flanked by limestone cliffs, deer grazing on hillsides above us, and geese nesting in the rock faces overhead, all with the huge Montana sky above.
We spotted countless birds, including my personal favorite, the American Dipper, and watched trout jumping from clear, shaded walls for hatching caddis and mayflies. We visited three separate petroglyph sites and learned about the native peoples who passed through this canyon and called it home before any of us arrived. Standing in front of those paintings on the limestone walls, I found myself recalibrating my sense of scale, of time, and of what actually matters.
I had never rowed a river raft before this trip. I'm from Minnesota, and my family paddles canoes on lakes, not rivers. I want to be honest about that, because it's part of what made the experience so unexpectedly enjoyable.
Learning to row means learning to think backwards. You sometimes face downstream but pull upstream, spin like a water bug, or face upstream and pull downstream. You read the water ahead and react before you're on top of it. I learned to spin the raft 180 degrees around corners, to navigate toward the best walls and fishing spots, and to beach us along faster-moving sections, including one memorable stop at Heaven on Earth Ranch for ice cream sandwiches and Deep Creeks.
I also learned what happens when you get it wrong. On the second day, William and I waded out of the raft more than once to push it off a sandbar or rock that just jumped in our path out of nowhere, I swear. We bumped into canyon walls slowly, mostly gracefully, and occasionally not. We laughed about it and "yeehawed" our way down the river.
What I didn't expect was how clearly our company values would show up out there on the water. Two in particular stayed with me.
Experimentation fuels growth.
I think of this value most often in terms of code: trying something, testing how far it holds, knowing a refactor is part of the process. On the Smith River, I got to live it physically. Every stretch of water was a new problem with a new tweak or experiment. Having VTI culture encouraging me to figure it out is what made the learning process so fun. You can try something new, maybe it's a bit weird, but you learn, and you get to truly understand what you put into practice.
Embrace pack mentality.
This one showed up every single day. We planned our days together, cooked and cleaned together, and kept each other safe: extra warm clothes were shared when someone was cold, and steady advice and encouragement were given when someone was nervous on the steep, precarious trail climbing up to the petroglyph cave. It reminded me of watching a documentary on the wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone, how the pack worked together to hunt and survive, and how their coordination and learned behavior directly impacted pack health, new pups born, and their ability to thrive in the national park. We had moments of real discomfort on this trip, and we got through all of them with clear, kind communication and a lot of shared laughter.
This wasn't a company-sponsored retreat with a formal agenda. It was a VTI-associated trip, open to team members, built on trust and shared interest, and entirely self-organized. No facilitators. No workshops. Just five people from the same team, out of cell range, problem-solving in real time.
I came back with a sunburn, a deeper appreciation for trout and Montana Whitefish, and a clearer sense of the people I get to work with every day. There's something about four days in a canyon that strips away the noise and leaves only what's important, what to hone in on. For me, that's what the Smith River gave us. Not a break from VTI, but a deeper look at it.
