"There is a point in boating, and it is a magical point, when one becomes intimate with a certain river. It extends beyond the position of mere familiarity with the rapids, or competence and proficiency at choosing campsites, good lunch spots, or side canyon trips. When truly intimate with a river, you can tell at one glance, barring freak circumstance, what is happening on it from where you stand to where it ends. The writers and river runners mentioned above have that sort of relationship with many rivers - the accumulation of a lifetime of floating.

After years of running the Middle Fork, as we unloaded the boats and gear I could study one rock mid-river at the base of Dagger Falls and read from it the next hundred miles of river. A brief observation of the water flow around that single rock could map out our next five to seven days, revealing how many river hours the party would have to spend to keep on schedule, what campsites, high or low, would be available, and what shape they would be in. It could even tell us where and how long we could dawdle for lunch or a swim."

"Only half a dozen souls-caretakers, really-now winter on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Before its touristification, however, with rafts thick as ticks, the river did have a resident population significantly larger than at present. For these inhabitants, overwhelmingly male, the Middle Fork was the canyon of their indexs, the canyon of their chores, the canyon of their stories.

Who were they? Men accustomed to doing things for themselves. Why did they choose the Middle Fork? The pull of the current and, likely, the calculus of chance. What were they looking for? A determined privacy at a private anchorage. What did they do? Mined, trapped, packed. Did they consider it a special place? In the same sense that one river differs from all others. Why did they leave? Probably because the river washed its hands of them."

"This is the eleventh time I've made this pilgrimage. On the fourth day, as I drift in my kayak past the mouth of Camas Creek, the desire arises to beach and walk upstream a couple hundred yards to the campsite where I spent timeless summer days as a boy. I do not, however. That perfect world is at rest, so I leave it at that.

Now, my gear is tied to a raft, not a mule, and I travel with my wife, Judy, and children, Tona, Robert, Tyler, and Eric. At each camp, as the scenery changes, I take them up trails and mountainsides to view tens of thousands of acres, primeval in their capacity to permeate and shock sensibility. Soon, the kids are roaming alone, walking the trails or climbing as high as dusk will allow. I have to call them back as though they are lost. They are changed by a few hours of primitive privacy, which, in their lives, is afforded only by our chosen wilderness. There's nothing like solitude-once felt, always sought."

"If you owned land in Western Idaho roughly 100 million years ago, you had oceanfront property. The landmass that is now Central Idaho was a relatively flat lowland plain of sedimentary deposits on the margin between ocean and continent. The ceaseless shifting on the earth's surface eventually resulted in the Pacific Ocean plate subducting underneath Idaho and North America. The Pacific plate continued to dive and melt, carrying rafted pieces of continental crust-much like the Hawaiian Islands-into the subduction zone at the edge of Western Idaho. This resulted in a terrific collision that rippled across what is now Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, reaching as far north as Canada and south towards Mexico to create the infant stages of the great and vast Rocky Mountains."

"Although the Middle Fork remains remarkably pristine considering the number of floaters it transports each year, the river's popularity has brought with it an inevitable sense of encroaching civilization. During prime season, the put in at Boundary Creek can be a circus, the good camps are all taken, and it seems as if there's another boating party around every bend. Luckily, however, there are places nearby where you can still boat the old way, places where you pack all your gear into your kayak and just go-no rafts to haul around, no lawn chairs, no gas-fired grills, no coolers. Just the basics.

You can camp where you want and have the river to yourself on the Middle Fork's three biggest tributaries-Big Creek, Loon Creek, and Camas Creek. Loon enters from the east about halfway down the river; Camas farther down from the same side; and Big Creek flows in from the west still farther down, just above Impassable Canyon.

The first known run of Loon Creek by white men was in 1980 by two Sun Valley-area residents, Al Reynolds and John Ward. The two have since run at least one of the creeks every year. Pioneers of Idaho boating, they're now in their late fifties. They've lost some hair and some muscle tone, but remain strong paddlers.

Back then it was a different world. If you saw a car coming down the highway with a kayak on the rack, you stopped to see who it was and where they were boating.

'In the old days," Al says, "the boats were made of glass and the men were made of steel. You used to boat Saturday and Sunday and fix the dings from Monday through Thursday.'"

"On the morning of October 1, 1879, near the confluence of Big Creek with the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, thirty-two Sheepeater Indians surrendered to Lieutenant Edward Farrow, 21st Infantry, and Lieutenant William Brown, 1st Cavalry, U.S. Army. With snow on the ground and six hundred pounds of their winter meat stores already captured, the Sheepeaters could no longer elude their more powerful, albeit more clumsy, pursuers. The costly and fiasco-ridden four-month campaign to rout the Sheepeaters from their central Idaho indexland was drawing to a close. Although reports suggest that many Sheepeaters avoided capture and continued to live in the Salmon River Mountains, the autumn of 1879 marked the beginning of the end for a people that had inhabited the Middle Fork country for over eight thousand years."

"There is a feeling to a river in flood, a river that is rising, confined to a canyon too narrow to contain it. It buffets the boats. It is inconsistent, chaotic. Waves appear suddenly out of nowhere. They rise and crash, throwing the boats from side to side, twisting them out of line with the waves. It took all our strength to keep the boats out of trouble, and to keep them close enough together to monitor what happened to each other yet far enough apart to see ahead and maneuver."