R is for Rabbit Creek

There are several fabulous white sand beaches on the Main Salmon, at least in my memory. Rabbit Creek might be the biggest pile of sand that I remember. Rhett Creek is high on the list, Fawn Creek is nice and there are many others as well. In fact, to my memory, a good 30% of the great spots to camp on the Main Salmon are white sand beaches.

But the biggest longest pile was Rabbit Creek. Coming up on it, you would first float by the Creek itself. Springtime runoff and flash floods caused by cloudbursts upstream in its basin had blown out the mouth of Rabbit Creek. There was a large debris fan at the mouth of the creek where it lost the velocity of being entrained in the narrow creek canyon and quickly settled out into the much larger space of the river canyon. The water of the creek was almost lost in this debris fan. You would float by that fan and then tucked in behind it, the white sand beach would begin. The debris fan was big enough to push the current over to one side. The water would then "fall" in behind the debris fan and creating an eddy which was where all the suspended sand in the river water would settle out.

This was an amazing beach in the reality time of when I was a guide out there. It's part of the river trips that Cale and his float trips experience in River and Ranch. Someday I hope to take another trip down that beautiful river and see if it is still there.....

P is for Pahsimeroi

It's a river and a valley. There's a fish hatchery. May is a tiny little place with a post office. I hope to get there someday. Alderspring Ranch is in the Pahsimeroi Valley somewhere near May I think. It is one of the Idaho ranches I thought about while conjuring up Cayuse Creek and the sidebar-T, that appears in River and Ranch and New Grass Growing. There is a roadless area and I believe there are (or were) wolves in the area. Hope I can get there someday. I drove by it many times, back when I was younger and maybe a bit dumber and never even knew or thought about the Pahsimeroi. ah well. Links below are to sources worth a scan or a read. Rather than copy them and add little value, linking to them, so their own words can be read seems better.
a video from the Pahsimeroi
notes from a newspaper editor
Alderspring Ranch

M is for Montana

Montana is all that and then some, as my kids say on occasion. Having gone to school there and lived there for a few years, there's a few parts I remember that aren't seen in most descriptions.

The first memory is of the people. Montana natives hunt. That is their excuse for getting outside. Many of them, a decent majority grew up in rural settings (not all), so they were outside as part of work and daily life. They never went camping or skiing or hiking. They did some, if not all of that in the course of their "work life". Students, on the other hand, were of course all over the outdoor rec opps. This made for an interesting clash. The School of Forestry attracted some Montana natives and as you might expect their goals were more resource extraction than conservation. The Forestry School also attracted a fair amount of tree huggers, especially from New Jersey for some reason. They, were more passionate about resource conservation than extraction. This double humped camel of student interests made things interesting at times. I was on campus at the height of the spotted owl controversy. Lots of passionate discussions.

The Rattlesnake Wilderness Area was adjacent to the Missoula City Limits. Back then and likely still now, it was the only wilderness area in the USA with bus service to the main trailhead. Rattlesnake Creek poured down into the Clark Fork, wild and unkempt. There was city park up and down both sides of it. Running paths all over. One of my favorite places.

There were bighorn sheep on Mount Sentinel as well as mountain lions. Every once in awhile you could hike to the M and spot bighorns off in the distance. Every once in awhile, there would be a picture in the city paper of a mountain lion on a patio eating the cat food out of a bowl someone had left outside. What a thrill that must have been, open the drapes as the sun comes up and there's a mountain lion three feet away......

K is for Kamiah and Kooskia (and Lowell too)

Little towns. Lost and getting loster as the saying goes. All three towns in today's entry are in remotest Idaho, way down the hill from Lolo Pass on Highway 12, on the banks of the Lochsa and Middle Fork of the Clearwater Rivers. The drive down Highway 12, which is part of the ?Lewis and Clark route is a treat, if you like mountain roads hidden away in the midst of flyover country.

Kooskia is one of them. With history as each of them likely have. Kooskia is a Nez Perce word and the town itself is within the Nez Perce Reservation or it was at one time, before white settlers violated their own agreement with the Nez Perce and settled on reservation lands. Mention is made of the Internment Camp, which was about 30 miles upstream from Kooskia.

Kamiah is another town, downstream from Kooskia, that is heavy with New Perce history. The name means rope net and has to do with the ropes and nets that the Nez Perce made for Salmon fishing. Likely more significant, the Appaloosa is claimed in New Perce history to have been bred in this area by the Nez Perce.

Lowell is the third tiny burg made mention of in today's entry. Population 30, it is just barely there any more. It occupies the wide spot between the confluence of the Lochsa and the Selway. You access it across a bridge from Highway 12. The Selway and Lochsa merge to form the Middle Fork of the Clearwater.

H is for hot springs

In the Idaho-based world of New Grass Growing (and River and Ranch) there are hot springs. They exist in the real Idaho as well. One of the pleasant outcomes of living in a geologically active setting is hot water. Generally this is because geologic activity tends to generate heat. Plate subduction, terrane accretion, plate moving over hot spot, granitic pluton cooling, you know, all the usual suspects.

Water, usually in the form of melted snow, works its way downward through mostly local fractures in overlying material. Heat increases with depth, so the deeper the water goes in proximity to the heat source (e.g. a granitic intrusion like the Idaho batholith) the hotter it gets. Literature fails to provide a consistent explanation for the introduction of water to the system for heating and then a separate exit of the now hot water from the system. Happily for whatever reasons of nature's plumbing, hot springs work.

In the world of River and Ranch and New Grass Growing, you'll find Lolo Hot Springs (most developed), Jerry Johnson's (on the far side of the Lochsa may now have a locked gate), Weir Creek (hardest to get to), Sharkey Hot Springs (out near Cayuse Creek), and the hot springs at the base of Lost Trail Pass. Down the river(s) you encounter Barth, Sheepeater, Sunflower, Hospital Bar and others that at the moment I am forgetting.

They are natural, others don't always leave them clean, and they may have naturally occurring sulphur-centric microbes giving them a distinct odor. So, use at your own risk and please leave them cleaner than you found them. They are really neat places.

River and Ranch Lives On In New Grass Growing!

Discovery is a very enjoyable piece of the writing effort. Discovery happens most commonly in the act of research, at least for me anyway. For example, in my most recent book, New Grass Growing, the Chinese Premier makes an appearance and does something. This was something I wanted to work into the plot and so I did. It's my book after all right? I was googling for the spelling of the current Premier's name, or maybe they have a President. Let's call it general research to support this piece of plot, given that Chinese culture is not on my everyday list. Not only did I discover the correct spelling of his name, I found some history of what he had done. This history included a two week farm stay in Muscatine, Iowa back in 1985. While I did not use that bit, it lent great support to the plot segment in which he is mentioned. Needless to say, this was a great and unexpected discovery.

My favorite type of discovery though, is the unearthing and fleshing out of a character. More than anything I'm calling this a miracle of the human brain. The sheer "amazingness" of creativity and the unknown spring from which it pours when the time and surroundings are right. For every encounter with "writer's block" that one may encounter there is almost always an even more compelling encounter with a blank page that is suddenly filled almost without effort. I stare at this suddenly full page and marvel at it, because this was not what I was thinking of when I started, yet it is what happened when I stopped and took a breath. It's different and better and lends a whole new layer of plot to my effort. Where it came from I do not know, but when it happens I love it. The writer's equivalent of a runner's high.

As River and Ranch matured and took shape, characters emerged and developed themselves over their time in the book. I found my ending for River and Ranch and realized that there was much more unwritten that wanted to come out. So I continued writing. New Grass Growing is one result of that effort. It continues the story of Cale and Dana and their life surrounded by friends and family and the big blue mountain sky that looks down on Salmon, Idaho.