White Bird, Idaho

Spent the day riding along the scary Idaho 95 as it followed the Little Salmon River north. Stopped for a cup of coffee at a small general merchandise/café store south of Riggins. Over mugs of coffee I asked the store owner if the café-au-lait-colored river running outside his back door was good for catching salmon. “Yeah, it’s sending a good scent down river to where the salmon are pooling,” he said. Returning salmon pool in huge groups at the mouth of the Salmon River awaiting to receive the correct scent from their mouth water source. “If you don’t get good spring rains like this, you don’t get a good scent down-stream to draw them back to where they were spawned,” he said. The benefit of having his store sitting on the river’s bank is that he can have a salmon on the grill within 10 minutes of catching it. I thanked him for the conversation and asked how much for the coffee. “37 cents,” he said.

Further down the road the shoulder along the river was jammed with pickups. Paul Oatman, a Nez Perce, was camped with some friends and his two children along the Rapid River. The Rapid joined the Little Salmon about 500 yards downstream. Only Native Americans can fish the Rapid. And only they can use nets or gaffs on long poles to catch salmon. The non-Native fishermen on the Little Salmon have to use poles. Oatman sells his catch as fresh and smoked. “I have customers who come over from Oregon.”

South of Lucile I encountered a miner about to enter his mine dug into the road cut. He was working a gold mine that was opened in 1895 but abandoned until the recent rise in the price of gold. “Oh, I pick at it and then sluice it,” he said. He showed me seven small nuggets he had mined. Didn’t want to comment t on their value but he harangued me for 20 minutes about “them liars” in Washington and how you can’t believe any government employee, be they city, county, state, or federal. I left as he launched into a discussion about church steeples being phallic symbols.

Tra la, tra la.