Whitewater park makes Cascade a New West innovator

Cascade, Idaho, has become the newest part of the New West, and the talent in the eddy at the city’s recently unveiled whitewater park on Tuesday, July 14, 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 [...]

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 I’ve [...]

Goldbug Hot Springs and the Death of Dugout Dick (Part 1)

Music from the FM radio turns fuzzy as the rocky precipices of the Salmon River canyon close in, and my truck works south along a ribbon of asphalt that follows the river’s meandering goosenecks. The last view of the snow-capped Bitterroot Mountains disappears in the rear-view mirror. The morning sun shimmers through riverside cottonwood trees, [...]

Lookout: a season on top of the world

It was the summer of 1961, and Jim Jones was the sole human occupant of a postage-stamp-size mountaintop.
His jaw bearded, his clothes soiled, Jones learned to keep the previous night’s popcorn in his morning pockets as he went about the duties of maintaining a Forest Service fire lookout. Three times a week he’d walk down [...]

Hells on Earth

Hells Canyon, a great gash in the earth’s surface, is created by the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border. The Snake in Hells is big, but there are only indications of what it was before the days of European expansion into the West. Between the Snake River’s headwaters in Yellowstone National Park and Hells Canyon, [...]

The root of sustainability is love

The following quote is the final entry in Philipe Burseillr’s book, 365 Ways to Save the Earth. With each entry corresponding to those on a 365-day calendar, it’s titled “December 31.”
Keep hope. To fully implement every change detailed in this book could take far longer than a year. And the suggestions here are just the [...]

What Life Has in Store

I climbed up the mountain to touch the sun,
But the mountain topped out before I was done.
I went to the desert to look at the waste,
But mystery and beauty is all that I faced.
I paddled the river to look me inside,
But the more I looked in the more I could find.
When the teardrop of fear [...]

Mountains on my mind

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.
I’ve spent the past four days in a feeverish delirium beneath a white down comforter. I write, sleep, read, sleep, edit, sleep, walk around the block, sleep, call my boss, sleep. And on the cycle goes. Until this morning.
I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.
There’s [...]

Yellowstone National Park by boat

A moon-just-past-full cast silver edges on clouds slung across the east, and long hoary shadows worked through a small strip of lodgepole pine nestled between a willow-filled marsh and the sandy southern shore of Shoshone Lake.
The muscles of my shoulders, arms and stomach were sore. We arrived in this remote corner of Yellowstone National Park [...]

Kipukas: discover the hidden landscape of yourself

How often we look but don’t see, sniff but don’t smell, listen but don’t hear. Indeed, who have we become when we have learned to touch without feeling?
Sometimes when my vision blurs and I seem to fail at these fundamental tenets of living there’s a Hawaiian word I ponder: kipukas. Literally, it means “openings,” [...]