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White Clouds -- by Lynna Howard This is an excerpt from a longer article. Copyright, Lynna Howard, 2000, all rights reserved. Lynna taking a break above Tin Cup Lake in the White Cloud Mountains. Images Courtesy of Leland Howard Photography "Extensive deposits of white limestone in the northwestern portion of the range looked like white cumulus clouds "Exploring Idaho's Mountains" --Tom Lopez In the 1860s about 30,000 men and only 1,000 women lived in the Idaho Territory, a sprawling, mountainous area whose indistinct borders included present-day Idaho and Montana, and most of Wyoming. Idaho was the last of the fifty states to be entered by white men. In the White Cloud Mountains, this frontier past feels like yesterday. In the relatively unpopulated and seldom explored area that encompasses the White Clouds, you can experience the legacy of the past with an immediacy that is lost to most of our modern world. Walk here and you may be the first person in fifty years to cross a meadow that's off the beaten path, or to rest your hand on the sagging lintel of an old cabin hidden in a grove of trees. The White Cloud Mountain Range is named, but many of the individual peaks are not. On topographical maps, most peaks in the White Clouds are identified only by their elevation (often over 10,000 feet) or a number preceded by "WCP" for White Cloud Peak. In the Sawtooths, the neighboring range that shares the Salmon River with the White Clouds, every peak, nook and cranny has a name. Yet the White Clouds are as impressive as the Sawtooths. The difference may be due in part to access issues. All of the White Clouds lie within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA), but it takes a more intrepid adventurer to find the roads that lead into the range and to explore a region that has fewer signs and mileposts. To begin our September photographic tour of the White Clouds, we took a dirt road south along the East Fork of the Salmon River. This road used to be closed, but an easement around private property was purchased and my brother and I were pleased to discover a whole world of wilderness that begged to be explored.... We parked where the road ended and climbed an unnamed peak with a good view of Tin Cup, Gunsight and Crater Lakes; the Sawtooths to the West; and other peaks marching away seemingly endlessly to the east and south, including Castle Peak. Castle Peak is the highest peak in the White Clouds (11,815). It's serrated crown is several hundred feet higher than any of its neighbors. Deep avalanche gouges in its sides stood out in sharp relief as the sun approached the horizon. Most hikers would have been long gone from the peak we were on when the grandest part of the show began. The sun dipped below the craggy horizon of the Sawtooths, back lighting them with liquid gold. Simultaneously, the moon rose and mixed its blue light with the rose on the snow fields near us... Our goal that day was to approach the White Clouds from the west, looking for alternate routes into the heart of the range. Pole Creek road leaves Hwy 75 near Sawtooth City. It crosses streams uncounted times, but is negotiable for a few miles by 2WD and then roughens to a normal 4WD road. The road goes over an 8,000 plus summit then heads back down into Washington Basin. Most historical sources dating to the 1970s note that Washington Basin, Washington Creek, Washington Peak, and Blackman Peak are all named after a black miner who pioneered mining in the area circa 1875. Sleuthing by Jim Ridenour, a retired geologist who investigated the names in 2008, reveals that mining claims reference "Washington Basin" in the early 1880s. But George Z. Blackmon filed his first claim there in 1894. We can give him credit for working with a mule and a pick axe before roads existed to bring in heavier equipment, but not credit for landmark names that include "Washington." The peak named "Blackman" is a misspelling of Blackmon. And nothing is named after the "Z" of his middle initial. A journalist named John Thatcher visited Washington Basin in 1897 and later wrote an article titled "The Black Man of Blackmon Peak." George Blackmon must have been quite a personality to reap so much posthumous fame. Trappers, traders and miners from the late 1880s revered prowess and toughness in men, horses, dogs and mules. To this day, you can find books that record the name ("Speed") of famous lead dogs. In spite of the wind, we climbed Washington Peak (10,527 feet - class 2). This time we could see the south side of Castle Peak, which glowed an unearthly red in the lowering sun. Goat trails striped the ridges. A four-foot wide goat highway crossed the last ridge next to a vertical drop into yet another lake. Clumps of goat hair clung to the sharp rocks.... We hiked through all of Washington Basin and were reasonably certain that we had seen all the cabins and ruins of cabins. Based on our survey, we concluded that the oldest cabin was most likely from the early 1880s. It is hidden in the trees, mostly fallen down, and very difficult to spot. (A few years later, we returned to the site and found that the few remaining logs had also fallen down. A deer trail went right through the center of what used to be the cabin, now a site of rotting logs and little else.) The site looked to have been untouched for a hundred years. Leland photographed what was left of the cabin, along with the remnants of some very old glass bottles that had turned purple, iron pieces off the wood-burning stove, tobacco cans, etc. It was eerie standing there in the quiet, morning sunlight where a man had labored with pick, ax and mule to extract gold and silver over a hundred and twenty years ago... Who to Call: The Sawtooth National Recreation Area 208-726-8291 How to Get There (Maps available in Stanley and Ketchum) When to Visit: Most roads into the White Clouds close in the Winter. High passes may not be clear of snow until mid-June. Summer and early autumn are good times to visit. Some areas are open to cross country skiing in the winter. Expect cold temperatures at night no matter what the season -- Lynna Howard Adventure Travel Menu | Return to Lynna Howard's homepage | View Sample Photos by Leland Howard Descent Into Heaven: Rafting the Bruneau River (This is an excerpt from a longer story)
"The most inaccessible river in the United States." "Understatement," I thought as I bumped over countless miles of quarry-rough road in the inhospitable high desert of southwestern Idaho. ... I scanned the horizon for some sign of the Bruneau River, our destination for a 3-4 day rafting adventure. Just as I was about to decide you'd have to be a bird to find the damned river, I caught a glimpse of the Jarbridge/Bruneau confluence, one of the few spots where the gorge widens enough so that you can see the river... Near the river the ecosystem changed dramatically. All along the banks, lush stands of grass, willows and wild flowers flourished in abundance. Indian Hot Springs, one of many points of geothermal activity along the Bruneau, steamed out of the western bank. Though it was late May, light snow fell as we prepared the rafts, the flakes evaporating in the mist from the hot springs. Compared to the bleak desert above, this was heaven.... The sides of the gorge are vertical for almost 30 miles, so steep that no one would see you on the river unless they crawled to the edge and hung their head over to peer down. A man with a good arm could throw a rock across the slender canyon at some points, where it may be narrow, but more than 2000 feet deep -- the deepest gorge, for its width, in the United States.
The river has cut its way through an enormous basin of cooled rhyolite flows dating back about 12 million years. The high silica content and the homogenous nature of the flows have combined to create such regal cliffs that their beauty is hard to describe. It's a celestial event to travel the river between these smooth giants, which capture the would-be adventurer in more ways than one. I realized that the cliffs were, for the most part, not climbable even if I had brought rock climbing gear with me. Helicopter rescue is not a possibility on the Bruneau. Hell could be just around the corner in this heaven... The Bruneau is no river for the indecisive or the timid. A mistake at Kendall's Cave would have meant an overturned raft trapped under a logjam. I don't mind swimming an overturned craft to calmer water, or retrieving it downstream, but disentangling one from a logjam is far more dangerous. Luckily, the cliffs encasing the Bruneau reduce the number of downed trees in the river. The jam at the Cave was the only problematic flotsam we encountered... I lost one toenail and took some nasty hits on the shin as I towed my over-turned raft out of the rough spot into calmer water. My brother, who could see that I was safe, called out with high humor, "Swim for all you're worth, this is your last chance!" The bum. The river took revenge for me, stranding his raft on a partially submerged boulder. He spent half and hour getting through the section that took me three minutes. I sat on the bank, eating granola bars and offering helpful comments... By day three on the river we were old hands, but still nervously checked the topo maps looking for clues to the beginning of Five Mile Rapids, the most famous and roughest water on the Bruneau. The cliffs began to mellow somewhat, but in places still forced the river into a narrow, but straight path through sudden darkness. For the most part, these were a welcome respite. There were no shallows to avoid, no turns or hidden currents, no shore, just deep almost voiceless water. In the narrowest part of the gorge we saw a golden eagle swimming his way through the air upstream, his wing beats echoing back to us off the cliffs. We were so close in that confined space that I could see the turbulence from his wings ruffling his tail feathers. "This," I thought, "Is what running the Bruneau is all about..." We were scouting for a place to camp for our last night on the river when we came on Five Mile Rapids unexpectedly. We'd just rejected a knobby gravel bar on our right as not being up to the standards of the previous nights' camps, and had wearily pushed off into the current. As we came around the corner, the river looked like it was filled with teeth. Big rectangular boulders, remarkably consistent in size, stuck up everywhere. White water frothed at their bases. We were fighting our way through them before we had a chance to do anything about it. Compared to the previous rapids we'd encountered, these seemed to go on forever. I gained a little on Leland at one point and he flashed me a grin and shouted, "I think we found Five Mile Rapids!" I smiled back, then spun myself around backwards as the only logical way to get through two close-set teeth that I'd approached incorrectly for facing-forward motion. I whipped my oars out of the way and cleared the boulders with about an inch to spare, then dug hard on the right side to face forward again. We battled through about half of the rapids and my arms were beginning to tire when we spotted a refuge on the left. We both pulled hard for shore and beached our rafts. Then we stood around for awhile, panting and grinning foolishly. About this gravel bar we had no complaints. We set up camp and slept deeply and well on the rocks... Whitewater aficionados often put in just above Five-Mile Rapids, shoot the rough stuff and then climb out. To me, this is a Class VI sin, because they miss the cliffs for which the Bruneau is justifiably famous. The cliff-walled gorge upstream of the long rapids is another world, a house with a thousand rooms and all of them fathomless...
Little Jacks Canyon, a tributary of the Owyhee River in the Owyhee Canyonlands. This small stream is located in a wilderness study area west of the Bruneau River system. Photo by Lynna Howard. Take me to Utah | Return to Home Page | Published books Return to Lynna Howard's homepage See PrueHeart Lode mining diary excerpts View Sample Photos by Leland Howard
Legalese: Unless otherwise noted, the text and images that appear on this web site are copyrighted material. Please do not copy or redistribute these materials in any way without prior permission. Thank you, Lynna Howard, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. |
Bruneau River in its narrow canyon. Photo by Lynna Howard.
I took a photo of my "office" on the brink of the Bruneau River chasm.