A long drive

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Trip Start Aug 11, 2006 Trip End Aug 13, 2006

  Syringa, Idaho
Monday, August 28, 2006

We set out on the drive north about midday on a Friday. Southwest Idaho, where we live, is pretty dry - sagebrush country at the edge of the Great Basin. But when you head north, it isn't long before you're in tree-covered mountains. We drove through Weiser on Hwy 95, and a great pizza place for lunch in Council. Then on to Riggins, a well-known jumping-off point for fishing and rafting trips on the Snake River. West of Riggins is Seven Devils Mountain and Hell's Canyon. For being amidst all those mountains, Riggins' steep-sided valley is at a relatively low altitude, and has some of the highest temperatures in central Idaho. At the outer edges of town the hills go nearly straight up. You really can imagine the cattle having their legs shorter on one side than the other from grazing in those steep pastures.

North of Riggins the road climbs back up into the mountains. We stopped at the White Bird historic marker commemorating the start of the Nez Perce war. The outnumbered Nez Perce emphatically won that battle, but ended up on a reservation in spite of it. From the historical marker you can easily see old US 95 switchbacking up the nearby hills. This was the only way up to the Camas Prairie until sometime in the 1970's. A miracle of engineering in its time, it probably caused a lot of over-heated radiators.

At Grangeville we turned northeast onto Hwy 13 and headed on to the Heart of the Monster, another historic Nez Perce site near Kamiah. The Heart looks like a big pile of reddish rock in the middle of a meadow. There's a post at the viewing point with an audio recording of the story, which describes how Coyote killed the Monster and threw parts of its body to the four winds, the heart landing near the Clearwater River. It's really a volcanic cinder cone, but makes a good story anyway.

At Kooskia we turned east on Hwy 12, the Clearwater Canyon Scenic Byway, which follows the middle fork of the Clearwater River, winding along through thick forest and beautiful rock and boulder-strewn river. At mile marker 93 is Syringa, a very small place, not really a town, but our destination. On Saturday we'd be floating down the Selway and Clearwater Rivers with raft outfitter, River Odysseys West, headquartered in Syringa. Also in Syringa is the River Dance Lodge, which offers cabins, a campground, and the Syringa Cafe. The whole complex covers about seven acres. We had reservations in the campground on the west end of the site.

The River Dance Lodge brochure says the campground has toilets and showers. This turned out to be a single porta-potty next to the campground's access road. Fortunately that weekend there was only us and one family of four camping. The showers, two of them, each in a little cabin-like shed, were five-minutes walk away, behind the cafe. There were also more toilets there. Spartan but perfectly adequate, and given that the whole place is on well water, appropriate to the available resources. Guests are requested to limit showers to five minutes.

So we made camp, setting up our tent in between slapping at the swarming mosquitoes. We'd brought food, so we retreated to the car to enjoy a sandwich and a glass of red wine, before hitting the sleeping bags. We were due to meet our rafting guide at 9am the next morning.

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