Ha, yeah. Speaking of the Bitterroot, there is a great story about Alex Lowe taking a canoe solo down a stretch of the Bitterroot, dumping it, getting caught in a strainer and ALMOST dying. This while he had one arm in a cast after falling off a solo climb of the No Sweat Arete in Mill Creek the week before. Surely it was only his superhuman strength that got him out of that fix.
That river claims a lot of lives for a mellow float, eh? Strainers and diversion dams and of course just the sheer number of people who float it, lots of them sans PFD and drunk.