by Timothy Egan
“Thro’ thickets in which we were obliged to Cut a road, over rockey hill Sides where our horses were in perpetual danger of slipping to Ther certain distruction & up & Down Steep Hills,” was how William Clark described the first American entry into Idaho and the drainage of the Pacific, “The greatest difficulty risque & c…” They had left a nation of five million people on the orders of a president who believed the highest mountains on the continent were in Virginia. Lewis and Clark traveled 7,689 miles between 1804 and 1806, and the only place that really seemed to scare them, where they were on the brink of starvation, was in the mountains of the Idaho-Montana border—the Bitterroots. “The country is so remote and rugged that nearly two full centuries later it remains basically uninhabitated,” said Stephen Ambrose in his chronicle of the Corps of Discovery.
When low-wattage loners, toy soldiers with mildewed grudges, and early-retired Los Angeles police officers seek a place where they can hide from the rest of the world, inevitably they come to the mountains of Idaho. When anglers, hunters, hikers, and river-rafters look for Alaska without going north, they also come to Idaho. The same state that has more armed paranoiacs than any other also has more white-water river miles, thirty-two hundred, than any other in the Lower 48. The state that sent a militia sympathizer to Congress could not be just flat, boring, and humid; it has sixty different mountain ranges, more than two hundred peaks above eight thousand feet, fourteen million acres of wild land, the largest granite foundation in the world in the Idaho batholith, and a most wondrous central artery: the River of No Return. The two extremes are drawn to the same place, perhaps for the same reason—cover.
We shoulder our packs and take final inventory. Extra water bottles. Oysters in tins of olive oil, sardines in mustard sauce. A blister remedy called Second Skin, and a nasal-blocking aid known as Snore-No-More for sleeping in tight quarters. Edam cheese and Costco warehouse bricks of orange cheese—“for nachos,” my younger brother, Danny, says. Soap, with an environment-friendly seal of approval on the front. Three small stoves. Canisters of kerosene. Extra whiskey, a dash of tequila, some limes. Wool gloves. Baseball hat. Topographical maps, trail maps, maps of the river. Toilet paper. Medical bag with antiseptic, gauze, tape, snake-bite antivenin, and ibuprofen. Most important: graphite fly rods, reels blessed by somebody royal in England, vests with fourteen pockets, and three dozen fake bugs—all hand-tied by my other brother, Kelly. We are going into native cutthroat habitat in the heart of the Bitterroots for one reason: to fish until we drop.
“Its the wildest country I’ve ever been in,” says Kelly. “And It’s the best fishing. Every cast a strike.”
“We won’t see a soul,” says Danny. “You’ll feel like the first person who’s ever been there.”
They make me promise I will never write about it. I bargain, and they hold their ground. We reach a compromise: if I do write about it, I will not name the river. I can say, without giving anything away, that it is in the broad, overgrown, western drainage of the Bitterroots, and that it is public land—not considerably changed from how it looked in that late summer of 1805 when Lewis and Clark were trying to follow some of those mountain streams to the big ocean. A famous painting of the expedition, Lewis and Clark in the Bitterroots, by John Clymer, shows men knee-deep in snow, rifles in hand, descending the steepest of forested slopes, trailed by a horse on which sits someone shivering in a Hudson’s Bay Company wool blanket.
No snow today. It is hot, mid-eighties, a bowl of blue overhead, three shades of green at eye level on the forest horizon. The ground crackles underfoot— pine cones, twigs, leaves from last fall. The wildflowers, lupine, Indian paintbrush, and columbine, are in third-act histrionics. The first huckleberries are ripening. My pack rubs against my shoulder blades and along the bones of my hips; no matter how I adjust one of the half dozen or so straps, the weight is never completely comfortable. The ballast problem is caused by tonight’s dinner; it will be my turn to cook on the first evening, and I’m carrying a surprise. But it weighs too much and is sloshing around inside a plastic container. Danny is the youngest in our family of seven kids. I’m the oldest boy. Kelly is in the middle. We brothers no longer fight like we used to, and we have pretty much settled on avoiding any discussion of why the college that I am loyal to, the University of Washington, usually beats the college of their tribal bonding, Washington State University, in an end-of-the-season football game called the Apple Cup. In their Cougar view, all Husky fans are elitist, Brie eating Seattleites who look down on them as hayseeds with cow shit on their shoes. They are rural and slow and have just a bit too much affection for farm animals. We are pampered, pushy, latte-sipping weenies. I had given Danny a backpacking espresso-maker for Christmas, lightweight and compact, partially as a joke. He refused to bring it along, saying it violated his Cougar ethics. A Cougar brings Nescafe and spills it on his shirt, where it joins decades-old bits of dried chili and Dinty Moore Beef Stew. What we do now on back-country trips is cook competitively.
“As we had killed nothing during the day we now boiled and eat the remainder of our pork, having yet a little flour and parched meal,” Lewis wrote as he and three members of the Corps ascended the foothills of the Bitterroots, soon to leave behind the land Jefferson purchased for three cents an acre.
We hike through a forest of larch and spruce, an easy trail, under laissez-faire Forest Service maintenance. The path finds the river, shadowed by old cedar trees, fir, some white pine. In the hottest part of the day, the pack is clammy; it feels as if it’s tied to me by a guy wire. But we’re making great time, three miles an hour, almost. The water looks dreamy, swift and clear in parts, pooling up in others. A little breeze flutters along the river. The trail seems to end, but my brothers know another way, guided by habit. We go up steep rocks, down a flank that would be treacherous if wet, over scree marbles and big talus. We stop at an opening, level and grassy. There’s a granite-ringed firepit, plenty of flat tent space, logs for stools. The river music, white noise for sleep, is at perfect volume.
“We lucked out,” says Kelly, dropping his pack. He’s red and sweaty and as happy as I’ve ever seen him. “We got the best spot on the river.” Our arrival sends an osprey away. The bird is a close cousin of the bald eagle, a superb predator, swooping and diving for cutthroat. In the narrow river valley, the osprey looks oversized, with a wingspan the length of a picnic bench.
“I hope he saved us some fish,” says Danny.
Just below our camp the water forms a deep pool after sliding over stair-step falls. We edge up to a small cliff, strip down, and dive in. It’s exhilarating, the water cleaning the trail dust and sweat away, and it’s numbing. We swim up into the white water and play there, battling the current. Near shore, Danny wedges cans of beer in the river, held down by rocks. In early evening we take our fly rods and walk upstream. I have on old leather tennis shoes; it’s too warm for waders. Danny takes a water temperature reading and pronounces it just right at fifty-seven degrees. I tie on an elk-haired caddis, a medium-size dry fly, and start working a stretch of the stream. I’m thinking like a fish—or at least how I think a fish would think in the hunt for fresh-hatched nymphs. My bug, in theory, has just come off the floor of the river, floated to the top, and is preparing for a few days of life out of water. We take turns at being the first to hit a hole as we move. I cast upstream, trying to land the fly in the place where the air bubbles from the current meet the slow water of the pool—the gravy train, Kelly calls it. The bug lands a little short of where I want it, but that’s okay. I’ve got enough slack out for a short, decent ride. One second, two, three, and—splash!—a nice-size fish rises for the caddis.
“Got one!” and I’m acting like a teenager in the thrall of first sex, all aflutter, heart pounding, hands moving awkwardly. The reel makes a zinnnng, zinnnng sound. I land the fish. It’s a beautiful, midsize, west-slope Bitter-root cutthroat. A native. There are no planters in this part of the West. Kelly cautions me to keep the fish in the
water, remove the fly carefully and quickly, kiss the trout on the snout and let him go, making sure he’s not too disoriented. While I’m doing this, Danny gets one on the line, and then Kelly connects on his first cast. The light is angled, summery, filling the valley with holy luminescence. All through the evening until the stars appear we catch fish and let them go.
“Caught 528 fish, most of them large trout,” Lewis had written a few days before going into the Bitterroots. The Corps had feasted on cutthroat. It would be their last good meal for some time.
AT DINNER, I pull out my surprise. At home, I had cut strips of lamb from a leg bone, cooked it lightly over a grill, and then packed it in a sealed plastic container. All evening, since we hit camp, the lamb has been marinating in a sauce of soy, wine, sugar, lemon, and rosemary. I unveil softball-sized Walla Walla sweets, the best onions in North America. You can bite into a Walla Walla sweet as if it’s an apple. I cut them into pieces. Then I take the peppers, red and yellow, and slice them up. I run metal skewers through the meat and vegetables, and then set them over low, orange coals of the fire.
“What the hell is that?” says Kelly.
“Dinner,” I say. “Lamb shish kebab.”
For a side dish, I have a rice pilaf, mixed with scraps of the sweet onion and peas. I take out a packet of dried mix, add water and olive oil, stir it up, and present it to them, next to vegetables and pita bread.
“Hummus mix. We’re eating Middle Eastern tonight. Dig in.”
Danny has cracked open one of his beers, but he seems dissatisfied. It’s not very cold. I pour him some red wine from a plastic water bottle. It’s not very cold either, which is how we want it. I turn the kebabs one rotation over the fire. They are nicely grilled, sizzling with juice and marinated blood. We talk about our siblings, three sisters and another brother, and sports, and Helen Chenoweth, the CongressMAN, as she calls herself, from Idaho. She comes from the wildest part of the Lower 48, the drainage of the River of No Return, and she hates the wild. There are no grizzly bears in the Bitterroots, the Sawtooths, anywhere in Idaho, though the Fish and Wildlife Service and plenty of outdoor-loving Idahoans are trying to bring them back. Chenoweth says the bears are “manic-depressive” and don’t belong in the wild because they might scare away people who come to Idaho on their vacations. Keep them in zoos, she says.
“Maybe the bears need counseling,” says Danny, who is not a doctor or a shrink but works with manic-depressives and psychotics in a public hospital in Coeur d’Alene, helping them through sports therapy.
“I’m going to try a hopper tomorrow if this weather stays hot,” says Kelly. He is focused, locked in pursuit; he will not talk about anything but fishing. “A hopper is cool, because It’s big enough, you can see the action.”
The lamb is done. The outside is flame-licked to a nice crust and the inside is pink. Using my wool gloves to hold the skewers, I give my brothers their dinner—full plates of flayed and marinated leg of lamb, with sweet onions and peppers, grilled over a pine and alder fire, a rice pilaf on the side, a little Chianti out of plastic to wash it down.
“Needs a sauce,” says Kelly.
“I have one.” And out of a side pocket of my pack I produce a little plastic film vial containing mint sauce, which I had made up in advance.
“This is unbelievable,” says Danny. “You hiked all this stuff in. Top Ramen would do it for me.”
“I’ve got salmon fettucine for tomorrow,” says Kelly.
“What kind of salmon?”
“Alaskan King, baby. Copper River King, to be precise. Should we hang our food?”
“Why? There are no grizzly bears. No predators. Were king of the valley.”
Lewis and Clark identified 122 animal species or subspecies previously unknown to science, including cutthroat trout. They gave a detailed account of grizzly bears, which they first encountered on the eastern side of the Divide, on the High Plains. A griz has huge balls, Lewis wrote, “the testicles suspended in separate pouches from two to four inches asunder.” The Corps hunters shot a grizzly bear, but it kept coming toward them. “It is astonishing to see the wounds they will bear before they can be put to death.” They fired repeatedly, “five balls through his lungs and five through various parts,” but the bear would not slow down, swimming for twenty minutes until it finally died. The Indians, Lewis noted, would paint their faces with war paint when preparing to hunt the big bears. In California, where grizzlies once lived in what are now San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Washo Indians used the same word to describe both bears and white people. The last grizzly was killed on the Plains in 1890. They were driven to the highest, coldest, most barren ground in America, until all that remained of grizzly bears in the West were a handful in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
In Idaho, there are a few woodland caribou up north, and bighorn sheep roam around the Owyhee Canyons in the south, dodging Air Force planes on practice bombing runs.
AT DAWN the valley is a different place, the chill from the river hugging the ground, having left a film of moisture on the outside of the tents. Sleep was deep and long; I was lulled by the river. We make coffee, scramble some eggs, eat fruit bars, and then stuff our packs with apples and cheese for a day of fishing.
“These beers are cold,” Danny says. He’s stumbled into a Cougar moment: the night temperatures have chilled the beer, meaning the only time he can really drink them is in the morning. Time of day has never been a problem for Cougars in the past. He laughs, puts three of them in his pack.
“I want to take you guys to Dollywood today,” Kelly says.
Dollywood is the name lies given to a series of pools far upriver, near the headwaters, where Dolly Vardens, the big bull trout of the Rocky Mountains, are said to dwell. The biggest Dolly ever landed in Idaho was thirty-two pounds. They live to grow to such a size because they won’t rise for just anything. They are smart, wary, and plentiful here, though approaching extinction in many other rivers of the West. We predators will have to be stealthy and present them with flawless bugs to lure them out of Dollywood. We follow a trail upriver, flushing another osprey away from breakfast. I nibble on a few huckleberries, dewy and crisp.
“Hungary as a wolf,” Lewis wrote of one of his early mornings approaching the Bitterroots. I le had eaten nothing the day before, save some wet mix of flour and berries. They had entered the most densely forested, chaotic, and vertical part of their journey across the continent thus far, and the food was nearly gone. He had his men divide a few pounds of flour into rations. They were with Shoshones, hoping to find the Pacific drainage, still following the letter of Jefferson’s order, to seek out “the most direct and practical water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.” At the end of the day, the Indians took pity on the Corps and gave them cakes of service berries and choke cherries. “Of these I made a hearty meal,” Lewis wrote. The next day he sent one of his hunters out for food. He killed a deer, and as he was dressing it the Indians gorged on the innards. The Indians did not touch the meat, only the organs. “Some were eating the kidnies the melt and liver and the blood running from the corner of their mouths, others were in a similiar situation with the paunch and guts,” Lewis noted. The whole scene looked carnal and primitive to Lewis, the Virginia gentleman. He ate a hindquarter of venison, cooked over the fire. “I really did not until now think that human nature ever presented itself in a shape so nearly allyed to the brute creation.” He may have overlooked what the French do with geese, ramming food down their gullets to engorge the livers for foie gras.
They found no game in the Bitterroots, except a few grouse. Even the Shoshones were beginning to starve. Finally, they were forced to kill and eat one of their horses. They called the area of this meal Colt Killed Creek. Snow fell. They inched west, realizing there was no simple passage across the continent, not a river or an easy portage. Unable to descend the Salmon River—the River of No Return—because it was too turgid, they had gone into the thickly woo
ded mountain country. Pained by hunger, they killed another horse. “A coalt,” Lewis noted in a brief passage, “fell prey to our appetites.” Clark designated the area Hungery Creek, a name that remains to this day, the spelling corrected.
The water is a little rougher upriver from our camp, the pools small but deep. Our casts have to be precise. Kelly’s hopper has no takers. The fish know better; it’s not warm enough in the day yet for grasshoppers to be floating downstream. I’m superstitious, sticking with the elk-haired caddis. In the faster water, it sinks. Kelly lends me a little vial of fluid that keeps flies afloat. Still, the fishing is slow for me. Danny can do no wrong. All morning I hear the zinnnng of his reel and look upriver or down to see his bent rod and the trout splash in the river.
“You’re ready for Dollywood,” says Kelly.
We find some shade and eat salami, apples, cheese, and wet cookies, and drink one of Danny’s beers, now warm. It all tastes great. Kelly, in his predator mode, is off chasing bugs. He conies back with a sample of what’s hatching on the river.
