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The Yellowstone River flows freely from its Rocky Mountain origins to the high plains of Montana and Wyoming. Ospreys, otters, grizzly bears, and bison are among the many creatures that frolic in the chilly stream as it cuts through the famous park. But a little further downstream, near Livingston, Montana, visitors to the area are often stunned to see another interesting species swimming in the icy rapids: a helmeted human all wrapped in rubber.
You can call it total immersion. Mike Kasic gets his kicks on the icy Yellowstone River with a pair of swim fins on.
Mike Kasic has no need for a canoe or whitewater kayak. Give him a wetsuit, pair of swim fins, some goggles, and that helmet and he’s perfectly fine. While most river goers absolutely dread being tossed in the drink, he actually prefers it.
“I tried the whole kayaking thing,” he explains. “But I was terrible at it. So terrible my friends stopped rescuing me because I got so good at swimming out of trouble and rescuing myself.”
Being immersed in rushing water wasn’t a totally foreign concept to Kasic. He grew up bodysurfing in California before moving to Montana in the early ’90s to escape the crowds. But becoming the best bodysurfer on the high plains was the furthest thing from his mind.
“I just didn’t like being stuck upside down in a piece of plastic,” he laughs. “I started packing swim fins so I’d have an easier time swimming out of trouble, but eventually I was like, ‘What do I need this kayak for?’”
Yes, it’s quiet out here, but when you’re a sound engineer like Mike Kasic there’s really no such thing.
Before long he’d mastered the many tasks involved with swimming through rapids, such as knowing when it was OK to go headfirst through the deep water sections, and threading from eddy to eddy in the shallow stuff. Eventually, he started looking for new challenges like standing waves that he could ride, “which was basically just a new way to keep bodysurfing.”
Today when he’s not riding those waves or stroking through rapids he’s diving below the river’s surface to check on the health and welfare of the underwater wilderness. That urge is somewhat connected to his day job as a professional sound engineer. While Kasic can record anything, his specialty is capturing underwater audio. He’s designed special equipment and techniques for the demanding craft, and his skills are highly sought after by television and film producers for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, and PBS.
As luck would have it, his wife, Kathy, finds him useful too. She’s a producer and film professor at Montana State University, and she can also be spotted swimming the rivers of southwest Montana.
While the above-water views are stunning, what’s underneath is just as intriguing to Kasic.
Their affinity for Montana and the Yellowstone River runs deep. Mike has steadily acquired a legendary collection of western shirts from nearby thrift stores (“We have real cowboys around here.”), and he and Kathy work on a number of environmentally focused films. They’ve spent a considerable amount of time studying the river’s ecological challenges. Locals often refer to Mike as the “Fish Man”—not just for his swimming prowess, but also for his starring role in a BBC awareness piece on the plight of Yellowstone cutthroat trout, which he calls “the soul of this river.” Kathy shot all the water footage.
The demands for Mike’s sound work require him to travel quite a bit. From Antarctica to Africa he’s worked in every biome on the planet, yet when shooting wraps he’s always rushing back to Bozeman, Montana, so he and Kathy can watch their daughter, Phoebe, run around barefoot outside.
While Phoebe’s too young for river swims, she absolutely loves camping trips and floating downstream in the family raft. That’s where dad teaches her how to listen closely the sounds of the wilderness—the sounds he describes as “the heartbeat of nature.”
Many of the Kasic family getaways are close to home because good camping spots are never hard to find in southwest Montana.
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