Devastatingly Beautiful

My family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, when I was in high school.  We had relatives living in Spokane, Washington, so a couple different summers we traveled as a family of eight from Salt Lake City to Spokane in a Ford station wagon fully laden with people and road-tripping paraphernalia.  My mom, whose imprint on me certainly includes every last one of her wanderlust genes, could never resist a historical site, a new place she had read about, or a road not taken before.  On one of the trips home from Spokane, we abandoned the Interstate for US Highway 93 at the behest of my mother and followed the Salmon River southward through Idaho. Although my memory of that trip has manifestly dimmed, I can still conjure “pretty” as a descriptor of that stretch.  My sister Diane remembers it as “devastatingly beautiful.”  With our lives always carrying us elsewhere, neither of us ever quite found our way back to that Salmon River valley.  Until last Monday, that is.

Early Monday morning, four of us—my sister Diane and I and then two of our friends, Katherine and Carolee—piled into Diane’s vehicle and headed northwards. After exiting the Interstate at Blackfoot, Idaho, we wended our way through a bit of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation (Shoshone-Bannock Tribes) to Challis and rediscovered the Salmon River valley from Challis to the Idaho-Montana border.  Sacajawea was born in this valley, and the Lewis and Clark expedition explored it as well in the summer of 1805, first floating a stretch of the Salmon River but ultimately finding it necessary to trek their way out.  I am most positive my mother knew all these facts when she bent the route of our family trip into that valley so many years ago.

From Challis, driving north on US 93 and escorted always by the Salmon River on one side or the other, we commented sporadically on the beauty of the landscape unfolding before us.  And we would inquire of Diane, “Is it devastating yet?”  Even though Diane never quite found the “devastatingly beautiful” images treasured in memory over all the ensuing years, she did concede that before us was indeed a land of aching beauty.

Arriving in the town of Salmon by late afternoon, we checked-in at our motel—the Sacajawea Inn, where each room was graced by a mural painted by a Native American artist, a mural that also established each room’s decorative theme.  Diane and Katherine would bed down in the Turkey Room—turkey feather fan, turkeys on the light fixtures, and a turkey toilet paper dispenser to accompany the mural—while Carolee and I would spend the night in the Deer Room—a deer head on the wall next to Carolee’s bed in all its taxidermied glory and a deer toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom…in addition to the mural!

Then we headed to the river, spotted the Idaho Adventures office, and signed up for a morning float on the Salmon River.  Such an assignation in place behooved us next carry out a brief shopping foray in pursuit of more suitable clothing items for our newly planned exploit. In Salmon, a town with the population of approximately 3000, we prowled the aisles of two of the three premises offering clothing options.  At the second one, where three of us purchased river-worthy shorts, the proprietor was visibly relieved to learn that the four of us did not plan to float the river on our own but had also rented a strapping oarsman along with the raft!

The next morning we floated the Salmon River for about ten miles with our strapping oarsman—a Boise State student studying civil engineering—who pointed out wildlife and geographic features, discussed both Sacajawea and Lewis and Clark lore, laughed at our antics, and skillfully navigated us along that stretch of river.  It was beautiful—at moments, devastatingly so.