When’s the last time you were thinking about taking a trip to Idaho? Exactly. You weren’t. But we’re going to let you in on a little secret. Idaho has got it all, and we think it’s one of the most underrated places in the U.S. for adventure travel.

Sure, Idaho gets to claim a little slice of Yellowstone National Park, but that’s just a taste of all the greatness you can find there. Have you ever heard of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness? It’s the largest contiguous wilderness area in the lower 48 and has approximately 2,616 miles of trails (that’s a lot of backcountry to check out!). And while that’s impressive, Idaho also boasts more than 3,000 miles of rivers, including the Salmon River, which is the longest free-flowing river in any state. The whitewater gods were kind to Idaho.

In the northern part of the state, crystal clear lakes rule the terrain. In the heart of Idaho, you can find deep gorges, towering mountains and rivers running so clear that you can spot fish 50 feet away (that makes for some darn good fishing).

To the south, thundering waterfalls, hot springs and caves await. Add to that, a night sky filled with stars, the widest variety of wildlife in the country, and all the hiking, biking, and rafting in between, and you’ve got yourself an adventurers’ paradise.

Imagine yourself in some of the best and most pristine wilderness that still exists today. Idaho is wild, untamed and rugged. It’s that little piece of outdoors that’s been untouched and left for us to experience in all of its glory. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to find?

Bet You Didn’t Know Idaho…

True and fun facts that will make you want to go

Idaho has 3,100 miles of rivers. More than any other state.

You may not fish from a camel’s back in Idaho. Hopefully, this won’t keep you from visiting.

Ernest Hemingway was an Idaho fan. He arrived in Sun Valley in 1939 to work on his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, because it offered wide open spaces for hunting, skiing, fishing and other outdoor activities.

At 7,900-feet-deep, Idaho’s Hells Canyon is the deepest river gorge in North America. That’s deeper than the Grand Canyon!

A treasure is said to be hidden in Beaver Canyon that has never been located. The buried cache is said to be that of the Montana sheriff turned outlaw, Henry Plummer. Maybe you’ll find it?

You can look into four states from Heaven’s Gate Lookout located in Seven Devils’ Peaks.

In Pocatello, a person may not be seen in public without a smile on their face. But from what we’ve seen, that might be true of the whole state.

Sources: InIdaho.com, LegendsofAmerica.com

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Three Generations on the Middle Fork

This is MY Cruise

5 of the Best River Campsites in the World

The post The Most Underrated State for Adventure Travel appeared first on River Currents.

Every once in a while I have a William Wordsworth moment.

Wordsworth is the immortal English poet who penned, among many masterpieces, a sonnet entitled “The World Is Too Much With Us,” which begins:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune.

I was having that kind of a moment in June of 2008: The world of deadlines and dishes and car repairs and computer meltdowns and endless emails and soul-sucking meetings was too much with me. Like WW, I had lost my connection with nature, the sea, the moon; I was out of tune.

Fortunately, I had arranged a few months earlier to take a whitewater rafting trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. So I stuffed my despair and newly purchased water resistant outerwear into a duffle bag, and flew from San Francisco to Boise, Idaho, where a posse of 15 fellow rafters crammed into propeller planes for the flight over endless undulations of densely forested mountains to the Old West hamlet of Stanley, in the shadow of the snowcapped Sawtooth Range. We spent the night there, then piled into a bus for a 2-hour drive to the launch point at Boundary Creek. And there my 6-day wilderness cure began.

Two highlights stand out.

Rough Water Ahead

This was a big-water time of year. High with snow melt, the river was very cold and flowing very fast. Each day had some Class III rapids, and 4 days had at least one Class IV.

On the second day, at a place called Lake Creek Rapid, my adrenaline really got pumping. As we approached this rapid, the guides said it had changed completely since last year. (This is one of the really interesting things about rivers: Their map changes from year to year and season to season. Winter floods might deposit huge tree trunks in an area that had been unobstructed the year before, or a flood of water might open up a previously impassable stretch.) So we beached our boats upriver and got out and walked to scout the rapid. The guides spent a half hour dissecting and discussing its angles, dips and flows. There was a narrow channel on the left of a big hole in the center.

They concluded that we had to hit that channel.

When we returned to our boats, everyone was very somber. The guides reviewed what we should do if our raft was overturned or if we were thrown from an upright raft into the river. Basically, because the water was extremely fast and cold and there was another rocky rapid just downriver, the message was simple: Swim like hell to get to the riverbank as fast as you can; guides will be positioned on both sides to toss throw ropes to you.

As we paddled back out into the river and approached the rapid, I could feel the fear in my pulsing heart and dry, coppery mouth. Our raft headed in a little too close to the hole and for a moment I looked straight into the maw of the roiling water, then in a roller-coaster split second — surging freezing water slamming us up and down and slapping over us, the sensurround roar of the churn deafening us — our pilot slipped us through and out into the calmer stretch beyond. I was exhilarated, by the narrow escape and perhaps even more, by the suddenly liberating sense of my own impermanence.

A Man Transformed

The second highlight occurred on the last night of the trip. As usual, after a full day of rafting, we’d pitched our tents around 4:00, then had some free hours to read, wander, and nap. Around 7:00 we’d gathered for another epiphanically delicious dinner, salmon and steak with grilled veggies, baked potatoes and deep dark chocolate celebration cake. After dinner, we’d sat around the campfire as the guides played guitar and harmonica and swapped tales.

Other nights I’d crawled sated into my sleeping bag around 10:00 and quickly fallen asleep, but that night, I kept re-rafting our previous days’ adventures on the whitewater of my mind. Finally I slipped out of my tent and sat on a rock looking out on a wide bend of the Salmon. I pictured the soul-soaring landscapes we’d rafted through: dense green pine trees and steep rocky slopes, long stretches of burned-out trunks from fires the August before, the snaking white-roiling curves of the river, the stark sun in a deep blue sky. I filled my lungs with the crisp Idaho air, filled my mind with the Zen roar of the river. The stars twinkled pluckably close, and a full moon rose over the crest of a pine-silhouetted crag.

I remembered something that Bronco, our crusty and endearing trip leader, had said at the beginning of our journey, “The Middle Fork is one of those places that will make you a better person just for being out there.” When I first heard that, I had some inkling of what he meant, but now the lesson was all around me: Sometime over the course of the 6 days, the river, the wilderness, gets inside you — it becomes a dynamic thing, churning through your veins. You absorb that wildness — the fresh open air, the green straining pines, the rushing roaring river, the geological texts of the implacable ageless crags. It freshens you and stretches you and puts you in synch with something deeper and broader than yourself.

By moonlight, I penned in my journal: “You leave the river, but it doesn’t leave you. Instead, you bring it to the life that roars and flows and bends before you; you map its depths and channels and flows, ride its surging waves and roiling holes, with a wisdom and courage that you didn’t have six days before. And that is wild.”

I looked up and stretched out my arms to hold the sight: The river danced with the moon, and everything was in tune.

This essay was originally created for the 2011 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post Rafting The Salmon River And The Restorative Power Of Wilderness appeared first on River Currents.

A Salmon River run offers something for the whole family — berry picking, campfire singing, cave exploring, even pedicures.

When the cool, deep shaft of the abandoned copper mine ended in a wall of rock, guide Mike Thurber turned to the group and said, “Turn off your flashlights.”

We were about 100 yards into an Idaho hillside. The lights went off as instructed, and in a moment of solemnity, 19-year-old Thurber quietly asked us to contemplate the phenomenon of utter darkness. For that instant, each of us was an island, alone in the black tunnel.

Then somebody made a spooky ooooo-ing sound, and, to squeals of laughter, all the flashlights clicked back on, most of them shining up under chins, turning faces into grotesque Halloween masks.

Solemnity is in short supply on a river rafting trip full of kids. If you’re wondering what a walk in a copper mine has to do with river rafting, you’ll probably wonder the same about blackberry picking, hurtling down sand dunes, Wiffle-ball and toenail polishing.

It’s About Family

Our whitewater rafting trip on the Lower Salmon River had as much to do with old-fashioned family fun as it did with running rapids. It was the warm and fuzzy things — singing around the campfire, eating meals together, inventing games, telling bad jokes, debating big issues with know-it-all adolescents — we remembered long after the whitewater thrills faded.

My wife, Jody, and I chose this particular adventure for family reasons. Friends of ours, the Fullers, had researched the trip — 4 days, 3 nights on the Salmon and Snake rivers starting in Idaho with the Outdoor Adventure River Specialists, or O.A.R.S. rafting company — and asked whether we wanted to join them. John Fuller teaches science to our 14-year-old son, Sam, and Fuller’s son, Woody, is a pal of Sam’s.

Our trip began on a Monday, when we took a bus from Lewiston to the Pine Bar put-in point on the Salmon, 62 miles upstream from our eventual destination, Heller Bar. We pushed out into the river around 11 a.m. Our little flotilla consisted of three rubber rafts, three wooden dories, a big paddle raft and three inflatable kayaks.

No-Worries Whitewater

The first 3 days of our trip were on the Salmon, a 425-mile river that begins in the mountains of central Idaho and ends at the confluence of the Snake River near the Oregon-Washington border. The Salmon is the longest free-flowing river left in the Lower 48. For rafting purposes it’s divided into the Middle Fork (the upper part), the Main and the Lower Salmon.

Each has its charms and its advocates. Depending on water levels, our part, the Lower Salmon, usually has fewer and less difficult rapids. We faced only a couple that count as Class III. (Class IV and V rapids are scarier and more dangerous; Class VI is considered unrunnable for a commercial trip.)

The lack of big whitewater might make the Lower Salmon a little tame for thrill-seekers, but it was perfect for our band of youngsters and their parents who wanted to get them acquainted with river rafting without the dangers of big water.

“This is nothing,” said veteran rafter Jim Eisch, 40, of Tampa, Fla. Eisch brought his daughter Kelsey, 8, son Jimmy, 11, and father, Ted, 69. “But I didn’t want to make them so scared they didn’t want to do it again.”

If we could have fast-forwarded a trip tape to the last day, it would have shown Jimmy grinning widely after his third back flip off a raft and saying, “I don’t want to go home. Next time I’m going on a 17-day trip!” With kids as young as 8 on the trip, danger was on every family’s mind. Before we put in, the guides gave us several safety lectures, explaining what we were to do if we went overboard in a rapid — or “went swimming,” as they say in river parlance.

Tossed Into The Drink

There was a lot of information to absorb, involving, among other things, head-patting signals, throw ropes, flip lines and the “La-Z-Boy” float position. All of it washed out of our heads when, separately, Jody and I were thrown from our kayaks at the Class III Bunghole rapid on the second day.

Disoriented after getting tumbled in the opaque wash cycle of Bunghole, we quickly bobbed to the surface. In less than a minute we were within grasp of a raft or dory, and in less than three, we were back aboard our kayaks paddling.

The important things, it turns out, were not only procedures but also the vigilance and unflappable nature of our crew as we got tossed overboard and forgot all our lessons. That and the bright orange life vests we always wore.

The inflatable kayaks — like beach rafts with sides — gave the most heart-pounding ride. It’s just you and a little bit of plastic careering through the rapids. When the waves of whitewater curl up and attack, the key is to paddle hard. “No lily dipping,” guide Marci Whittman told us before we set off the first day. “No tea-and- crumpet maneuvering.”

Two days later Sam wiped out at the start of the most technical (river-speak for dangerous) of the rapids, Eye of the Needle, sending him swimming through the churning water.

At the bottom of the rapid, he happily climbed back in his kayak. The guides were impressed. His mother was unnerved. Sam had a blast. “That was great,” he said.

But the best ride, as far as we were concerned, was in the dories. Even Sam and 15-year-old Adam Mowery agreed. “The dories were awesome,” Adam said.

Because the wooden boats are rigid, they don’t bend to the waves, making the highs much higher and the drops like a mini roller coaster. And for the best ride of all, the guides let us ride the bow. That means wrapping your legs around the prow, grabbing onto a rope and riding the boat like a bucking bronco.

Follow The Sun

Aside from the occasional whitewater, river days were soothing stretches of lazy rocking and leisure, framed by spectacular scenery of golden hills and deep gorges. At the start, trip leader Barry Dow had suggested we leave our watches behind. The sun became our clock, and the plaintive note Dow blew on his conch shell our call to meals.

We would pack up and push off after breakfast each morning, then spend 2 or 3 hours on the river, sometimes falling overboard for a swim to cool off. We would stop at a sandbar for lunch and more swimming or games, then return to the river for a few more hours.

We usually pulled up around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, which left plenty of time for onshore activities. The first day set the tone. A couple of dads tried their luck fishing while the rest of the adults sought relief from the 95-degree-plus heat and the kids horsed around at the water’s edge. Later, somebody started a Wiffle-ball game. When wind blew the ball into the river, 13-year-old Amy Fuller yelled, “Seventh-inning stretch!” and everybody jumped into the cool water.

Eventually, big clouds boiled up, bringing shade and relief, thunder and a few drops of rain. By morning it was clear and dry.

Valuable Lessons

The first night, before we got down to the business of family fun, Dow discussed the dangers of onshore life. It was pretty tame stuff—poison ivy, hornets, the rare brown recluse and black widow spiders, and the rarer rattlesnakes.

“This is important,” Dow said solemnly.

“Don’t harm the animals. This is their home. We’re visitors.” Some of the parents hoped the guides’ reverence for the river and its residents would rub off on their children.

“My kids are city kids,” said Susan Mowery, the Indiana mother of Adam and his sisters, Anna, 12, and Abbi, 10. “I want to show them there’s more to life than Disney World.”

Guide Matty Wilson, 28, aglow in the orange campfire light, pulled out a guitar and sang folk and pop songs, some so old that even the parents recognized them.

Soon the fire went out, leaving a soft night breeze, the sound of guitars, a big moon trying to shine through the clouds and a group of contented parents watching their children do something besides playing video games.

Bonus Moments

That was just one of many special shore-leave moments. At that campsite, many of us had our toenails painted. Whittman, an art teacher in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho when she’s not a guide, set up a salon in her raft. At the back end was a studio where the girls and some of the younger boys painted rocks and made sand art. In the middle, she painted toenails.

Having science teacher John Fuller along on the river trip was an extra treat. For Fuller, facts are fun, and it wasn’t long after our departure that he got trip leader Dow to talk about the river and its flow. At the time, it was running at a mild 7,000 cubic feet per second, or CFS, but during floods, it ran more than 100,000 CFS. Dow pointed out driftwood trees high on the banks and said, “Imagine the river that high. It’s like a wild animal.”

Fuller’s favorite moment on the trip, scientifically at least, came at a blackberry patch just below the mouth of the copper mine. He watched in awe as one guide tossed a berry 50 feet into the mouth of another guide. And it gave him an idea for a science lab, involving the physics of tossing grapes (in the absence of blackberries).

There was no need to teach the physics of fun; the kids on the trip were experts. By the second day, increasingly confident in their new surroundings, they were jumping off the rafts into the water to cool off. By the third day, they were swimming down a Class III rapid. Water splashing fights routinely broke out.

Does It Have To End?

On Thursday afternoon as we approached Heller Bar, our destination, no one wanted the trip to end. That night guides and clients met for a farewell dinner at a restaurant near Lewiston, even though two families had to alter their travel plans to make it.

During toasts and testimonials, Dow rose and spoke for the guides, saying, “We hope the river spoke to you and gave you a special gift, because it does to us.”

As we left the restaurant, families were exchanging e-mail addresses and Whittman was painting the few remaining blank fingernails left on the little girls.

Months before, when the Fullers had pitched the family rafting idea, Woody, with teenage disdain, called it “the dumb trip.” Afterward, he had a new name for his rafting adventure down the Lower Salmon River. “Now,” he said, “it’s the great trip.”

This essay was originally created for the 2012 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post Family Rafting On The Salmon River In Idaho appeared first on River Currents.

Considering his diverse boating capabilities, Kenney gets to enjoy a multitude of watersheds — the best the West has to offer in terms of alpine scenery and wild landscapes! He also has a big sense of humor, wide range of educational experience, and can occasionally be found dressed in women’s apparel while cooking on the river. Get to know this well-educated, Kentucky native in our regular series of guide interviews!

How long have you worked for O.A.R.S. and what did you do before becoming a river guide?

I’m from Terlingua, Texas, originally from the great commonwealth of Kentucky. It’s my ninth year working for O.A.R.S./O.A.R.S. Dories, and my thirteenth year as a river guide. I’ve had a pretty eclectic professional career prior to guiding — I’ve been a banker, a college basketball coach, and a professor. I have two Bachelor degrees and even a Masters, and in some crazy, roundabout way, I think it’s helped me to become a decent river guide [smiles].

What do you love about your job?

One of the few reasons why I love doing it, is that O.A.R.S. Dories loves taking people down wild and scenic places. We’re very much committed to taking care of our wildlands, trying to have as little impact as we can on the wilderness setting, and at the same time showing our customers some of the most beautiful, historic landscapes that you can find in the lower 48.

What is a typical day like for you on the river?

I like to start my work day in the morning by smelling that cowboy coffee, floating across the beach. Then the guests start to wake up smelling it, and you catch that first light hitting the canyon walls. It’s all quiet and peaceful, and you get up and cook a really nice breakfast for your clients. Then when you get out on the water, you can see that mist coming off the water as you turn corners …

There are some days where we run real technical Class III-IV water, and then we get to float on sections of just liquid glass. Our days are chock full, there are times when we get to do side canyon hikes where you’re staring at a 200-foot waterfall and then go back to running rapids. Once you get to camp and get everything set up, and you’re sitting there with your clients and your friends, and you get to enjoy the campfire and watch that last bit of light hitting the canyon walls, you all of a sudden realize, you’ve created magic again.

What is it about river trips that you find most appealing?

What I love most about multi-day river trips is the odyssey that is created with that trip, and each trip is unique unto itself. I love the blending of clients and guides with the water and the wilderness. This collective odyssey creates a sense of timelessness and a freedom, and I love sharing in that process.

How have the people you’ve met on the river impacted your life?

I have met so many amazing people from all walks of life during my years of guiding, though two probably had a particular influence on me. Both of them have terminal cancer, and they’ve done multiple river trips with O.A.R.S., and to see their incredible personal strength and sensitivity is really inspiring. To share our world with them — again and again — while watching how they value the small, little things of everyday life has been really enriching.

What important skills must a rafting guide possess?

Most all river guides, we love to talk, especially about things we know and other things we think we might know, but with the ability to listen, you’ll get to know your clients better. Then together you can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle to create a successful river trip. I think we’re able to get out clients to more quickly start to live in the moment, and then be able to start to strip back the layers of the onion that can symbolizes the challenges that they have out there in their everyday lives.

I also have a very wide collection of feminine apparel [laughs]. I really enjoy getting our guests to dress up with me. I think it helps to push to envelope a little bit, and maybe expand a few comfort zones. For me, it helps me to try not to take myself so seriously.

What do you like to do when you’re not on the river?

I really enjoy reading and scribbling out more river poetry when I’m not on the river. I also really love to sleep; I mean I really love to sleep [laughs].

Have you been on a trip with Steve? Got a question for a raft guide? Say hi in the comments below!

The post Meet Stephen Kenney, Idaho & Colorado River Guide appeared first on River Currents.