V is for Veil Falls

Dimly remembered, but a check of Google tells me it is still there. A check of the Middle Fork guide which I have managed to hang on to all these years informs me it is mile 80.7. I remember the iron stains (I think it's Iron anyway) on the walls of the hollowed out space beneath the falls. The Veil Falls I remember was wide and whipsy, almost like the wind was blowing it as it fell.

While the Middle Fork is in the midst of large wilderness areas with little accessibility, the country is not pristine. It's been lived in for a long time. First by Sheep Eaters and later by gold miners, homesteaders, fortune seekers, settlers and hermits. Earl Parrot comes to mind.

Veil Falls is in the same stretch as Big Creek, Waterfall Creek, and Elk Bar more happily remembered places on the Middle Fork, and all worked in to the stories running through the pages of River and Ranch and New Grass Growing.

M is for Middle Fork

Where to start? I've already used the term 'flyover country' too many times. Idaho - yes that's true too. I haven't covered the severe infestations of Sasquatch...probably because it does not exist, although the country is certainly big enough to hold a few Sasquatches.....

In River and Ranch, Cale is a river guide on both the Main and the Middle. This is part of his cover story as he works on his last project, but it is also part of his 'recalibrating' to life as a civilian after years of high stress, high kinetics Special Operation Forces work overseas for Uncle Sam. River rafting is the prescription for a mind that has seen and experienced the violence and stress that most do not even know exist, and for that matter, Cale and his partner generally cannot even talk about.

In life as in fiction, Idaho and its Main and Middle Fork provides what many seek. In the quiet of the mountains, the energy of the rapids, and the peace of a dark night on a river beach, we all find the cure for the aches we carry along.

snowpack is holding up...

In Cale's world of rafting the Salmon River and the Middle Fork, much depends on runoff from snowmelt. So rafters spend much of their winter huddled around basin snow reports like this:

Here's the real snowpack report. High water is a spring thing, but summer water on the Idaho rivers often arrives with the July 4th launches. In my memory, the launch closest to July 4 was a big double launch and kicked off summer. You could kind of get away with not wearing a wetsuit. Finally. Prior to that though, as in all of June and May, rafting had to deal with cold high runoff. On undammed rivers like the Middle Fork and the Main, runoff can be an amazing thing. When you see how strong high water is during spring runoff, you start to understand how 20,000 foot peaks can be reduced to sand on a beach. On the map above, the Salmon Basin is looking pretty much average, which should make for a decent rafting season. What stands out for me are all the yellow triangle down in the Sierras. Poor California. It's going to be a tough season down there.