When Team Badfish SUP loaded up from home base in Colorado to head north to Montana, it was in many ways a fulfillment of a dream for my business partner Zack Hughes and I. We started Badfish back in 2009 because we wanted to figure out a way to surf on our home river, the Arkansas, which runs through our little mountain town, Salida. We hoped somewhere along the way we could build a business, making a new type of board, born and bred in our environment, encouraging people to start seeing whitewater rivers from a new perspective on this “new” craft.
However, a few years into losing money and trying to grow a the business, we were no longer able to fool ourselves (or our wives) that it was just about business. For Zack and I, Badfish is about staying in touch with what we love as we move into (and through) our forties — with families and all the clichéd mid-life, micro crises. Both of us came of age, living out of trucks, paddling, surfing, climbing, and seeking adventure, sharing that accompanying passion that dies hard.
So rolling into Missoula, Montana with a young, hard-charging crew, sleeping on the ground alongside a deep canyon, and paddling the Clark Fork River is our reason for doing what we do. Keep the stoke alive.
