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At Indian Creek

Posted on by John McCarthy / Leave a comment

Day seven of pulling a crosscut saw to clear trail in the wilderness presented our final challenge—to cut enough of the seemingly endless deadfall to matter. As we hiked up the trail in the early light, the crew again rallied. With the morning warming, three crosscut saws sang across the forest as sharp teeth bit down into logs, propelled by the cadence of pumping, paired arms. I bumped ahead on the advance team, swinging a Pulaski or ax-adze combination tool, chopping limbs, smacking wood, preparing logs for the saws’ bite.

Rain at lunch break didn’t slow us down. The fresh wet only cooled us before we went back out and hit the trail hard, knocking off logs, jumping ahead for the next downed tree. Late in the afternoon, facing our last hour at work, I pushed out front to chop small stuff and ready big logs. Through a tangle of fallen lodgepole pine, I spotted the welcome sight of another cut log at the other side. We reached our goal of connecting two stretches of cut-out trail in the wilderness.

We’d cut out six miles of trail in a week, sawing and chopping more than a thousand logs in the wide expanse of the wilderness. It felt like a triumph. We hiked back to camp along the undulating trail, looking at our fine finished work, striding fast with a bounce. Satisfaction capped a tough job, and accomplishment overcame exhaustion. A week in the wilderness of Idaho is always an adventure. A week spent reopening an almost-lost trail enhances the challenges and the rewards of being in the wilderness. Continue reading →

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The Stoddard Mill Pond

Posted on by Geraldine Mathias / Leave a comment

When our daughter married into the Stoddard clan and introduced us to present-day descendants, I soon realized a family of great storytellers had come into our midst. They were eager to share family escapades and adventures, but since she and her extended in-law family live in the Boise area and I’m in Blackfoot, not until the last four or five years did I realize their family is steeped in eastern Idaho history as well. To my surprise, I found that the site of the Stoddard Mill Pond in Island Park, about fifteen miles from our summer home, was once a thriving lumber enterprise owned for six generations by this same Stoddard family.

When the Stoddards gave up their lease in the early 1960s and moved the mill to St. Anthony, the site and the pond were reclaimed by the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, which recently restored it to its original depth of six feet and turned it into a kids’ fishing pond stocked with rainbow trout. Only children are allowed to fish the pond, and catch limits apply. It is an easy drive along Highway 20 north of Ashton toward Elk Creek Station, and then, about five miles down Yale-Kilgore road, a very small, high sign directs visitors to the pond, and I think it’s the perfect place for a kid to learn to fish. The pond is round and flat, with no shrubs lining its perimeter, so children can be taught to cast a line on calm water. Several picnic tables surround the sides where families can eat lunch, wait, or watch fledgling fishermen catch dinner. A floating dock and a fishing platform have been installed.

Plans of several Island Park groups include erecting a kiosk that will tell the history of the pond, but that hasn’t happened yet. Across the narrow road from the pond, three large concrete foundations remain from the mill site. About a hundred yards away from the pond in the fringe of trees that fronts the more dense forest is the former location of the mill camp and facilities.

Besides the pond, little remains to suggest the existence of the small Idaho town of Rea, where the mill was last located. But Larry Dalling, son of Alta Stoddard Low, brought the place alive for me with his animated narrative about living there during the summers as a young boy and teenager. His cousin, Ron Stoddard, has also told me many stories, as he was the last Stoddard to own the mill, whose history goes back more than 130 years. Continue reading →

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Where’s the Fire?

Posted on by Billy Jim Wilson / Leave a comment

It was dusk, and we could smell whiffs of smoke from the forest fire we had been sent to extinguish, but we couldn’t spot it.

The timber was heavy as we rounded a ridge on the trail, heading northwest from Baldy Lake in the Seven Devils Mountains. Not knowing the exact location of the fire or its size and condition gave me visions of it suddenly taking off, and gobbling us up.

We were here because early that morning the lookout at Hat Point, across Hells Canyon from the Seven Devils, had spotted intermittent smoke from a lightning storm of the previous day. Jack Alley, the Riggins District Ranger, had sent me to hike in with an older fellow, who I seem to remember was a college student from Arizona. We went by truck to Windy Saddle, at the end of the road from Riggins, and then began walking. It was 1954, my second summer of working for the U.S. Forest Service. I was only eighteen, a year or two younger than the other summer employees, but I was nominally in charge, because I knew the country from having visited my Uncle Allen Wilson’s cow camp a couple years earlier.

We had begun our hike at about 1 p.m. on a Thursday. The trail led westerly across both forks of upper Sheep Creek, onto Dry Diggins Ridge, and then southerly to the upper reaches of Little Granite Creek, where my uncle’s cabin stood for his cow camp. From there, the trail ran downhill a little ways and passed Baldy Lake, which was all new to me. Now that it was almost dark, I wanted to avoid camping in the timber. I remembered an open meadow on the west face of the ridge that we’d been following and suggested we hike the eighth-mile or so down to it, to camp for the night.
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Bungalow Bears Beware

Posted on by B.J. Campbell / Leave a comment

Back in the 1950s, before I met my husband, he worked as a highway engineer tech with the Bureau of Public Roads. For one road construction job, the BPR crews camped for about seven years at Bungalow, a U.S. Forest Service worksite on the North Fork of the Clearwater River.

Recently, USFS archaeologist and historian Robbin Johnston told me that the agency focused on road building at that time. In earlier years, the work emphasis at administrative sites, such as Bungalow and Kelly Creek, was on trail building, fire protection, and mapping. USFS managers later emphasized maintenance and construction.

In 1964, in an effort to economize within the North Fork District, the Forest Service selected Kelly Forks as the future administrative site. That new location would centralize planned work on roads and bridges. Bungalow lay too far in the other direction, about twenty-five miles, making building maintenance and upgrades costly and impractical, especially in winter. Kelly Forks had space for a helipad, and provided housing for fire fighting crews. As the largest level area on the route, Kelly Forks eventually replaced Kelly Creek and Bungalow. Present- day Bungalow serves as a campground.
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Heroics on the Lochsa

Posted on by Jim Fazio / Leave a comment

I’m sitting on the porch of a log building that once served as the assistant ranger’s house at Lochsa Historical Ranger Station in the Clearwater National Forest. It’s now the visitor center and first stop on a self-guided tour of the site, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, but in 1934, it was one of the buildings saved by the heroics of rangers surrounded by raging wildfire.

Looking through the trove of historical items in the visitor center one afternoon, I came across a typed account of this saga, which helped me appreciate how fortunate we are to have this place. The story was by H. D. Weaver, a Forest Service employee of the period. So far as I know, it has never been published. Continue reading →

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The Underground Forest

Posted on by Mike Blackbird / Comments Off on The Underground Forest

Approaching from the west on Interstate 90 at the outskirts of my northern Idaho hometown, a billboard proclaims:

You are now near KELLOGG
The Town which was Discovered
By a JACKASS—
And which is inhabited
By its Descendants.

Local legend claims that an old prospector, Noah Kellogg, was camped up Milo Creek in 1885. He awoke one morning to find that his jackass had slipped its hobble during the night and climbed up the mountainside. Kellogg spent all morning trying to catch his jackass, only to watch it scramble out of his reach each time he approached it. Finally, out of frustration, the old prospector threw a rock, hitting the jackass in the flank. Startled, it kicked out its hind legs, knocking the cap off an outcropping to expose a vein of lead and silver, which would prove to be seventy feet wide and half a mile long [for a slightly different version of this tale, see “Kellogg—Spotlight City,” by Erin Stuber, IDAHO magazine, May 2004].

Most likely, the story is apocryphal, but Noah Kellogg did discover the biggest lead and silver mine in the world. It wasn’t long before other rich mines were discovered in the mountains around the Silver Valley. Between 1885 and 1979, the mines produced 907 million ounces of silver—almost five times that produced by the legendary Comstock Lode in Nevada.
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Oh, So Close

Posted on by Laura McAnulty / Leave a comment

In the spring of 1939 my young and eager husband, Rex McAnulty, bought two lumber trucks on the strength of a contract to haul green lumber from a small family sawmill in the hills north of Mountain Home down to town some fifty miles away.

Like us, the sawmill owners were trying to pull themselves out of the Great Depression by their own bootstraps. Continue reading →

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