The Snake River and Fire in the West

The Snake River

How generous the people of Idaho can be! Twice, while visiting National Parks, I asked women where the water fountain might be, and twice was offered their own bottles of water! And an Idaho couple invited us, perfect strangers, for a day on the beautiful Snake River.

An eagle in her nest

Karen is a Bureau of Land Management regional director, gracious and generous with information, her time and effort and her husband Jeff is a bighearted wildlife biologist and firefighter. They put in their boat at the Conant landing of the Snake River, near the Antelope Flats. We stepped into the aluminum skiff and motored on, only the engine sound marring the pristine cottownwood gallery forests, which Karen oversees in her role at the BLM. The BLM possesses a mandate for the uneven patches of land (overlooked by the original surveyors) that surround rivers, where mighty cottonwoods shelter a special environment below, called cottonwood galleries--home to bears, wolves, foxes, and most obviously eagles. We saw only one lodge, very posh but unpretentious, owned by Mark Rockefeller whose family loves and preserves--and owns--large tracts of land in the region.

Ridgepole pines march up gentle slopes, tender marsh grasses cover boggy islands, corridors of hexagonal basalt columns tower like manmade sea walls. This kind of volcanic rock forms in hexagonal pillars and ends up looking like ancient ruins as lichen takes root. Aeries of eagle nests, some 7-10 feet across weighing as much as two tons, are high in the mighty cottonwoods--one eagle avoided our gaze, but another soared white and strong across the river. They return to their enormous nests each year during their 30-year lifespan, where they too fish in the Snake. With eyesight 8-10 times sharper than humans, they can see an animal two miles away, and travel up to 60 miles an hour. The Bald Eagle's name comes from the old English word for white.

We motored up to a waterfall splashing broadly over round volcanic rocks and mossy hanging gardens where boys played in life jackets. The natural rock croppings are perfectly symmetrical, beautifully landscaped by time. But mostly we saw fishermen standing in shallow craft, swirling their rods, some of them possibly celebrities who have sought out this choice stretch of wilderness. Dick Cheney used to fish there, disrupting this untouched paradise with helicopters overhead and security men on waterskis and his whole Blackwater guard.

Basalt cliffs on the Snake

We docked in tall grass, at a campsite now obscured by the fallen half of a cottonwood, and Karen laid out cheese and nuts and fruit. We chatted about firefighting, which plays such a large role in the American West. It was the great fire of 1910, The Big Burn, that shaped today's forest service. It ended the innovative reign of Gifford Pinchot, who not only created the forestry service at the time but also funded a new forestry school at Yale, to educate on the conservation of America's lands. He himself had been educated by the forestry school of France, where he found the study to be closer to gardening than to his vision of consolidating lands for public use and natural conservation. But he became an adversary of the great conservationist John Muir, for whom forests were temples.  Pinchot, a utilitarian, thought of forests as crops, and even advocated dam-building in National Forests. It was also his policy to let fires take their natural course. In 1910, he lost his job.

John Muir quoted on this grave

The Big Burn, the largest US forest fire ever, savaged three million acres in the Idaho Panhandle and surrounding states and killed 87 people. A Forest Ranger named Ed Pulaski and his crew took shelter in a mine near Wallace, Idaho, and when his men grew restless, he pulled out his gun and held them there--they all survived. Other firefighters who were not so fortunate are buried in a solemn circle in St. Marie, Idaho.

Firefighters buried in St. Marie

Congress was persuaded to direct the Forest Service to try to extinguish all wildfires, a policy that has come to be moderated in recent years. Many stops along our journey commemorated firefighters and explained the necessity of controlled burning. And the many flags at half mast, from Salt Lake City up to the Panhandle, were for men or crews who fell this summer, fighting fire those weeks we were in the West.