The “Bruneau Busters”

Photos Courtesy Field & Stream and Leonard Miracle

It sounded like a good idea – floating the length of the Bruneau River. No one had done it before so in 1950, Leonard Miracle, his brother and a friend decided to try it. “I was curious what was down here and my buddies were rather gullible about the whole adventure,” recalls Miracle who also had another motive for the trip. He hoped a magazine article about the trip would help him land a job as a writer.


Equipped with a World War Two surplus raft and a few supplies, Miracle, his brother, Stan, and friend Johnny Hughes, set off on what is now called the Jarbidge River. They had no idea what to expect. “We had a lot of apprehension about coming around a curve where the walls closed in tight and being confronted with a 100-foot waterfall,” says Miracle.


Their luck quickly changed when their raft hung up on a rock and their meager supplies washed downstream. “It would probably be easier to list the things that we still had,” Miracle says. For the next several days, their meals consisted of fish and crude pancakes fashioned out of wet flour. “My partners had to eat that with a lot of grumbling about it,” Miracle says. “They frequently spoke of walking out and I held them at bay by pointing out how many miles of sagebrush and hot desert would be between us and any destination they had in mind.”


When the trio didn’t arrive home on the scheduled day, a search was launched. By that time, however, the men were nearing the end of their adventure. A local newspaper picked up the story – crediting the “explorers” with being the first to take a boat the length of the 60- mile long canyon.


Miracle’s account of the trip appeared in a 1951 edition of Field and Stream Magazine. For the next 30 years, Miracle wrote for Field and Stream and Outdoor Life. Although he visited the Bruneau Canyon, he had no desire to float the river again. “There was never any interest expressed by either of my buddies. They never again spoke of the prospect of going again down the Bruneau River. It was not considered ever. Not for a second,” Miracle says.


In 1998, Outdoor Idaho convinced Miracle to run the river again. “I was curious to do it,” Miracle says. Miracle’s wife, however, was concerned about his age, and “whether or not there was any sensible reason to do this as compared with mowing the law and weeding the garden."


Renegade River, by Leonard Miracle
The Bruneau River Expedition, by Jonathan Hughes
Three Men in a Rubber Boat
Explorers Return After Conquering Bruneau Canyon
Program Transcript