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Fifty miles of white water
Along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River you can find one of the few wildernesses in this country which remain almost untouched by man. But the trip is no joyride.
The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, in central Idaho, was, until the recent softening influence of the airplane, a river of lonely men. I believe it is the longest stream in the United States that is untouched by a road at any point, and the dozen cabins scattered along its 130 miles were, with few exceptions, inhabited exclusively by bachelors.
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Indian Encampment on the Salmon River, Idaho. Fredrick Schafer 1889. The Salmon appeared nearly as wild to Ted Trueblood when he wrote about his wilderness journey in 1951. Painting photo by J.H. Saltzer |
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The upper river has been changed somewhat by landing fields, but the lower third is just the way God made it. The country is so rough and inaccessible that it has remained untouched. It was through this portion that my wife and I floated in a rubber boat so I could report the adventure for True.
L.L. “Andy” Anderson, who pioneered the unique float trip for the passengers, invited us to make it. We accepted, but we were like the old lady taking her first ride on a plane. As the pilot came through, she said, “Young man, be careful. I’m doing this against my better judgment.”
We knew something about the Middle Fork. It is a wild, mysterious, twisting river that drops more than twenty-four feet to the mile—a bitch or a sweetheart, depending on its mood—and we didn’t particularly relish the prospect of clinging grimly to a spray-filled boat for nearly fifty miles. Nevertheless, we decided to go. The chance to fish for trout that never have seen an artificial fly before doesn’t come along every day.
We drove from our home in Boise to Sun Valley and then swung north for 150 miles into the back country. We stopped at the end of the road. Andy Anderson and his brother Joe have a ranch there. It’s a pretty spot, and it’s not crowded. Their post office, at Forney, is sixteen miles away, and when they need groceries they have to drive forty-seven miles to Challis to buy them.
From their Bar-X Ranch, we rode fourteen miles down Camas Creek to the river, taking two rubber boats and all of our food and equipment on pack horses. There were six in our party, counting the two boatmen. One boat never makes the trip alone.
The next morning I fished while Andy and Adrian Burstedt, who handled one of the boats, loaded up. When it was time to push off, I started to take down my rod and put it in the case. Andy said, “You can leave it out and fish as we go along if you want to.”
So I left my outfit assembled and got into the boat, but I didn’t expect to fish. I knew I’d be holding on. I had met the Middle Fork before.
I had hooked a salmon one evening in a deep pool at the head of a long rapids. He was big. He jumped once and threshed around the pool, then charged away downstream. I had 150 yards of line on the reel and I hurried after him along the shore as layer after layer of silk peeled off the spool.
After we had gone 200 yards, he began to edge over toward the far side. I tried to force him back, but you don’t force a fish like that on tackle as light as mine. He swam around a boulder that stuck up out of the water two-thirds of the way across. The line came up tight against it. The reel handles continued to turn.
I tried to flip the line off the rock, but it was too high and too far away. There was no time to waste. I handed the rod to my companion, broke off a dead alder for a wading staff and started across.
I edged out into the river, standing sidewise to the current, and the water soon was above my belt. I inched ahead. It got deeper, and the current piled it up against my ribs. At last, gasping and trembling, I reached the backwash from the boulder. I waded upstream through the quiet water, flipped the line off and climbed up on the rock to rest. My partner hurried away after the salmon.
After a short pause, I started back. I eased into the current, but I was only a few yards from the shelter of the boulder when, somehow, my feet flew off the bottom. I tumbled head over heels. I lost my staff. I c aught my footing again and stood up but the water knocked me down.
The worst danger in white water is that of getting knocked out by your head crashing into a rock. I swam with my head upstream, angling slightly toward the shore. When my feet touched bottom I waded and when I got knocked down I swam some more. I hit plenty of rocks, but all of them with my arms or legs.
I don’t know how long the struggle lasted, but when I finally reached shore I was a quarter of a mile downstream and so exhausted that I just crawled out on the rocks and lay there gasping. I thought I knew the river then. I actually didn’t know the Middle Fork at all, however, until we started down it in that rubber boat.
We pushed right out into some fast water that looked mighty rough to me. The waves were capped with white and the current sucked irresistibly around barely covered rocks. I braced myself and held on with both hands. Nothing happened. We just floated through. The big rubber boat, six feet wide and twelve long, with a spray guard on the bow, glided over the waves like a bobsled on fresh snow.
We sat on the inflated sides and leaned back against our duffel. The river had us. She was in a playful mood that morning. She took us gayly down short rapids and out across still pools so deep that the bottom was hidden behind a veil of blue. She whirled us over sparkling, shallow bars. She carried us as gently as a pair of angels riding on a cloud.
Pretty soon I began to fish. Shucks. Nothing to it. Eventually, however, I heard a roar in the distance. The banks pulled in and the current grew swifter. The booming got louder. I put my rod down. I knew that sound and when I heard it I realized that I had urgent business on the shore.
We swept around a curve, and there it was. The river narrowed, picked up speed and pitched down out of sight.
There was a rainbow-tinted mist above the rim. I had a bad feeling. It was the same feeling I had once when the car in which I was riding angled down off a grade in a wild pitch that eventually ended with the motor pushed up on the seat between me and the driver.
The point I overlooked, of course, was that Andy doesn’t believe in drowning passengers. He says there’s no future in it. He and Adrian pulled the boats to shore, then we walked fifty yards while they lined them around the Grouse Creek Falls.
The Middle Fork was considered impassable until 1936. Then, after two unsuccessful attempts in which his boats were smashed, Dr. R. G. Frazier, of Bingham Canyon, Utah, ran the stream full length. The boats that finally withstood the beating on the rocks were especially constructed and covered with conveyor belting. One rubber boat, taken along as an experiment, got through better than any of the others.
Learning from Dr. Frazier’s experience, Andy and Joe Anderson tried a rubber boat first. They ran the canyon without mishap, although the trip was a rough one. Their five-man boat was too small for white water. Then they got a couple of big boats and began to take a few passengers. My wife and Helen Burstedt were the ninth and tenth women to make the trip; fewer than fifty men were ahead of me.
The river carried us on down to the mouth of Big Creek. A telephone line and a bridge cross the Middle Fork here. The phone line is a typical Forest Service, one-wire grounded circuit, used to report fires. The bridge is of the suspension type, wide enough for a pack horse, made of logs and cable, and a sign at each end says, “Load limit ten horses.”
At the mouth of Big Creek the last sign of man was left behind. The trail that follows the river from Sulphur Creek, near the headwaters, to this point doesn’t go through the canyon. There is no landing field because there is no level spot big enough to hold one. There is no phone line. There is no trail because there is no place it could get through.
The river plunges into a chasm. Hack Miller says it is deeper than the Grand Canyon, and he has been through both with Dr. Frazier. It is called impassable. That is true in the sense that a man on horseback or on foot can’t get through it on the summer. A few have made it in the winter. Dan O’Connor, of Challis, is one, and he walked the shore ice. He can have my share of that.
When we left Big Creek, we began to see more game. We saw a band of eleven bighorn ewes first, then three rams, then a couple of goats and more sheep. We saw nine bears, and old sow and cub together, then the others one at a time. Some of them were close enough to shoot with a BB gun.
I won’t forget one big, brown bear. We drifted around a bend close to the inside shore, and there he was, not more than thirty feet away. He glanced up and saw us and, I swear, he looked exactly like a boy caught smoking behind the barn. His face was a mixture of amazement, chagrin and alarm. He dropped the piece of rotten log out of which he had been licking ants and bounded twenty yards up the slope. Then he had to stop and look back, just to be sure. He said, “I’ll be go to hell! People,” and started to walk away again.
It was on the rim of this canyon that Sam Parrot, the hermit, lived. There was nothing the matter with Sam. He just didn’t like women.
Sam stopped at the Brad Carrey ranch one evening in 1919. He had a few burros, and everything he owned was on their backs. Four or five men, including Shorty Waits, who told the story, and Mrs. Carrey, were there that evening. All the men but Carrey were bachelors.
After supper, Mrs. Carrey said, “Shorty, why didn’t you every get married?”
“Oh, I was always too bashful, I guess.”
She put the same question to another. He said he was too quick. Finally, she got around to Sam.
He didn’t answer. He got up and stalked out. He slammed the door as he went and that was the last anybody saw of him for some time. He packed his burros and went away and he kept going until he reached the impassable canyon of the Middle Fork. He built a cabin there, and it was three years before he went to Salmon City for supplies.
As we dropped down into the canyon, the Middle Fork got playful. She tossed us through narrow chutes of foaming water. She held us back on great pools where we actually had to row downstream. We passed the House Rocks where she got lost among a scattering of boulders as big as $10,000 (postwar) bungalows, and she pitched us where she liked as easily as I can toss a chip.
Andy is good. He knows what to do and how to do it, but there are times when one man against the Middle Fork has about as much chance as one mouse against a thousand cats. Occasionally, despite his skill, we slammed against a rock or, more frequently, slid up on top of one that was barely covered with water.
Believe me, you have a foolish feeling sitting there high and dry while the river rushes by on both sides. When that happens we would shift our weight and rock the boat and eventually teeter off into the stream.
These boats really are what make the trip possible. I never ceased to be amazed by the beating they can absorb without the slightest injury. When you hit a boulder with a wooden boat something has to give—and, brother, it’s not the rock! When you hit one with a big rubber boat it just bounces off, swings around and floats away.
The only thing that could cut through the tough covering of one of these boats would be something with a knife edge, such as a piece of iron or glass or a jagged rock. There is no junk along the Middle Fork because there have been no people to leave it, and every fisherman knows that 99.9 per cent of the rocks in the bed of any stream have worn, rounded corners.
There were thrills, though, and sometimes I got scared as hell. Imagine this: The river has you, and you’re moving fast. The water is white, mainly, with boiling pockets behind the rocks and occasional blue-green slicks. You glance up at the walls towering a thousand—possibly 5,000—feet above the tortured stream. They’re speeding by.
You look back at the river. You’re racing now, around a curve of pitching whitecaps, cliffs on both sides, the wide stream pinched to a gut of churning, roaring water. Suddenly you see something that you know can’t be, but there it is, and coming at you fast.
Head-on you face a towering cliff that runs a hundred yards to the right and left. The river slams against it at the base, a thundering, booming cataract of foam and spray. You can see that, and nothing more. The river ends, apparently, against a wall of rock.
You seize the lash ropes and brace your feet and freeze. This is it. No boat can fly head-on into such a maelstrom and survive. Faster and faster. You’re moving with express-train speed. No use to shout—even if you could. Your voice would be unheard above the thunder of the stream.
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