The Salmon River

The Salmon River is the fabled River of No Return. Four hundred miles long, it is the longest river completely contained within one state (outside of Alaska). Rising in the Sawtooth Mountains in peaks over 8000 feet, the Salmon flows through the rugged wilderness of the central Idaho mountains, a wild and free-running river. It isn't easy to float downstream, but it was impossible to return. The river is named for the most courageous fish in nature--the salmon that swim upstream 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean each year to spawn and then to die.

After World War II, Andy Anderson came home to Challis, a remote village on the Salmon River, where he had persuaded Jack Simplot, Idaho's leading potato industrialist, to buy a ranch in the area. Among the supplies that Simplot flew into the ranch were four little yellow Air Force boats.

Anderson decided to rig up one of the boats and take off down the river. Many years later, he recalled that the trip almost did him in. "Alone, going down the river, I could hear the rapids ahead of me. I would pull in and walk down to see them. I would figure out which channels I could detect to get through them. This continued clear on down to the confluence of the Middle Fork with the Main Salmon. I took about ten days to just work my way down. There were a lot of times I wished I had never started, it was so scary."

But he soon made a second trip, this time with his wife Melba, the first woman to ride through the canyon. "We made it. It was spooky all right. I turned right around and I went again alone. I wanted to learn it," he said.

Anderson wasn't the first to put a boat in the Salmon, but he was the first to consider how this unparalleled adventure might be made into a commercial proposition. His brother Joe and others practiced running the river. Soon they were equipped with better boats, pack horses to get people to the river (no airstrips in those days), and the other paraphernalia of outfitters.

Writers from national magazines accepted invitations to float the river and wrote of their adventures. Barry Goldwater of Arizona heard about the river and said, "I want to go. I don't care how wild it is." The next spring, Anderson took him down. Goldwater made a color film of the trip and sent Anderson a print. Anderson showed it when he spoke to sportsman's clubs and chambers of commerce.

Outfitters still run the river today. The Salmon River country is protected as wilderness by federal legislation. As history evolves, it presents its ironies. Anderson's son Ted, who once worked for the family business, became a "river ranger" for the U.S. Forest Service. Float traffic on the river eventually became heavy enough that visitors needed to use special techniques to obliterate the traces of their visits. Ted Anderson introduced the "fire pan" to the Salmon. Instead of dumping fire ashes into the river, which also meant pull tabs and bits of aluminum in the river, campers leave ashes in place and build the next fire on top of them. Eventually, the ash becomes extremely fine and powdery, easy to pack out.

With efforts such as this, running the River of No Return is still a wilderness experience. Because of the nature of a river, dozens of parties can float the river at the same time and never see or hear each other.