Getting back on lead

There’s something liberating that happens deep within you when you’re willing to fall. Senses become tuned, heart goes into tasks and failures become learning experiences. In rock climbing, falling only happens on lead, when you place protection in a cliff wall, clip your rope to it and climb higher. If you slip on lead, you’ll [...]

Salmon tracks: Jones calligraphy probes spirit and ecology

Michael Jones is particularly proud of the 15 salmon-centered calligraphy works he’s created. A Boise vegetable farmer and conservation-oriented activist, Jones was born and raised in Caldwell, Idaho, and reminisces fondly about the days before dams were erected on the lower Snake River, back when he watched salmon course the rivers and streams of the [...]

City of Rocks at sunrise

When California-bound wagon trains passed through southern Idaho in the mid-1880s, the jumble of granite monoliths near Granite Pass were a great curiosity. Today, the area designated as City of Rocks National Reserve is a Mecca for rock climbers from around the world. With some of the finest granite face climbing anywhere, there are around [...]

Blast onto Mt. St. Helens—with skis

On May 18, 1980 the Earth groaned beneath Mount Saint Helens in southwest Washington state as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake walloped the Cascades’ youngest volcano and triggered one of the largest landslides ever recorded. As the land moved, the entire north slope of the 9,677-foot mountain fell away, exposing the volcano’s core and provoking gigantic [...]

Izilwane: ‘Those Dammed Salmon’

The Tendoy Store on the banks of eastern Idaho’s Lemhi River is a place arrested in time and frozen in the annals of the Pacific Northwest’s rich salmon fishing heritage. Among the small general store’s charming clutter are groceries, t-shirts, tube socks, post office boxes and a small assortment of dry flies mounted to a [...]

Summer Solstice summit bid 2011

At 7,237 feet, Mores Mountain was a little smaller than the craggy, sky-scraping precipice I imagined to ring in the summer season, but this easy climb of about 3 miles and 1,500 vertical feet offered a rewarding summit within a stone’s throw of Boise–and proved downright inspiring. Neighbor to the taller Shafer Butte, the location [...]

Rio Chama serves up wilderness New Mexico style

Silence hovers like rainforest humidity over the lower Rio Chama in the sandstone desert of northwest New Mexico. The river slows, its barely-audible currents lapping at shoreline grasses; and thousand-foot maroon cliffs take form against an impossibly blue sky. The quiet of the lower Chama is both distant and distinct, with a quality easy to [...]

Remember the Castle Rock Fire (Part 1)

For twenty days in August and September 2007 the Castle Rock Fire surged though the Smoky Mountains of central Idaho, and at each turn threatened homes and residents in the resort kingdom of Sun Valley. More than 1,500 firefighters fought the blaze by day and camped in a tent city in a field south of [...]

Whitewater park makes Cascade a New West innovator

Cascade, Idaho, has become one of the newest parts of the New West, and the talent in the eddy at the city’s recently unveiled whitewater park was evidence of that. There were four or five kids in shiny Jackson playboats, and a few more over the age of 25 or 30 trying to keep up. [...]

Boise’s Basque Block: Pride, Heritage and Tradition

I’m 37 years old and, last October, bought my first chair. It’s a sturdy little chair, an antique with varnished wooden legs and embroidered seat. It’s situated at a wooden desk on the second floor of an 1864 brick home in the center of downtown Boise, Idaho. It’s my eighth month in the house, and [...]