An Idaho 4th of July

Beautiful scenery on the South Salmon

For the 4th of July weekend I was able to escape for a whopping six days and take another trip out to the great state of Idaho. Phil was once again able to join me for a long weekend and I picked him and his kayak up at the Boise airport on Thursday morning and headed for destination Yellow Pine, ID. On the way up there we had the pleasure of seeing the ultra-classic North Fork Payette for the first time in either of our lives. The North Fork is one impressive piece of whitewater and it quickly becomes clear that the numero uno rule of road scouting does not necessarily apply. For those interested, the numero uno rule of road scouting is, gIf you can't see it from the road, it's easy.h Eventually we stopped road scouting the most awesome river I have ever seen, killed my iPhone by submerging it in water, made it to Yellow Pine, ID and were on the water by two pm.

We had the pleasure of boating the East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River with a crew of three WA catboaters and the very solid R2 of David and Laura. David was Val Shaull's R2 partner the day they showed Dana and I down the Truss and had the infamous flat wrap. Anyhow, I promptly proceeded to make a complete fool of myself by popping an oar in the long complicated Class V that is Flight Simulator and my troubles didn't exactly end there. I managed to row a pretty good section of whitewater with one oar while trying to get my other oar back in until this large double fin rock blocked my downstream progress. My left tube popped up over the first fin and dropped into the slot between the two and pinned before unceremoniously dumping me head first into the river in a downstream flip. Fortunately the only injury was to my ego and that was the only section of Flight Sim that was not being watched from the road.

The next couple of days we repeated with same run with different boating partners and better results, except for the Phil's Rock incident. We were actually in Yellow Pine to meet up with our new Idaho catboater friends Jerry Kiser, Craig King, Steve Rich and Ted Day. The latter two were to be our partners in a three day wilderness trip down the South Salmon.

Phil came to have a rock named after him on our second day of boating the EFSF. He paddled over this wave/hole thing to find a surprise pyramid rock hiding right behind the pillow. His bow dropped between the pillow and the rock he pinned horizontally with his head downstream. I was ahead of him at this point and quickly alerted our boating partners to the developing situation. From my vantage, I could see that Phil was able to get breaths intermittently, but had no idea how long he could sustain the effort to do so. It turns out he had pinned in such a way that the pyramid rock was directly against his cockpit (lap) and precluded any chance of pulling his spray deck and swimming. After a minute and forty seconds of this heinous situation, Phil was able to extricate himself by climbing out the tunnel on his spray skirt. I have never been so happy to see a kayaker swim in my life.

It turns out that Independence Day in Yellow Pine is a pretty fun albeit redneck experience. We had some great fireworks, potato gun duels in Main Street, and a pretty good band on the porch of the Corner Bar singing the classic rock anthems. Later in the evening I had consumed enough whiskey to dance with the local ladies and sing karaoke in the Corner Bar. We didn't get a particularly early start the next morning for our South Salmon trip.

I am not really at liberty to discuss the South Salmon trip in the public domain. All I can say is that the South Fork of the Salmon really sucks. The whitewater is sub-par, the canyon is all burnt, the bugs are awful, no fishing, no good campsites, well you get the picture (above). Skip this trip and boat your local roadside commercial run instead.