River dinner

This is a river dinner setup. Tall tables, dutch ovens, and old-school coffee.
The tables double as benches in the gear boats. And the peach cobbler makes a good pre-breakfast snack if there is any left over. It was always a treat to see vacationers expecting fairly nasty camp food turn out pleasantly surprised with the food that we made as part of these trips.

Chapter Two is now live in Amazon

After a few days of waiting for Amazon to fix their dtp system, I have finally been able to upload Chapter two of Down the River Up the Road. This picks up where chapter one left off - right in the café eating lunch with the woman he met at breakfast. Things move fast from there for our main character, pushed on by his unseen but very much heard shimmering face. A second character emerges. A woman.

This is a Kindle-only book for the foreseeable future. At some point, once I have the chapters written and solid, I will join them together for a book. But for now it's exclusively Kindle!

Given the chapter at a time nature of the book, the characters might seem slow to appear. This book is about fatherhood, it is about active healthy teen and pre-teen girls, it is about Idaho. Horses and dogs are here in the story. Surfing even makes an appearance. Those topics will all reveal themselves as the chapters roll out.

But our first character's love of the Salmon River runs through the whole thing, or at least the chapters that are devoted to him. Idaho is truly a wonderful place and the Salmon River is certainly part of what makes it such a nice place. It inspired this book.

Shoebox Warrior - Banjo

Down the River Up the Road is about many things, rivers, mountains, people, horses, etc. It is also a dog lover's story about one small dog in particular. This dog, or at least the fictional version of her that fits in a book.This is our shoebox warrior in one of her favorite places.

A great run through Rubber - Middle Fork July 1988

One of the biggest drops on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River is known as "Rubber". I imagine some big sweep boat left a chunk of itself on one of the rocks in this drop and that is how it was named. Needless to say it is a big drop for the Middle Fork. Most of the rest is technical. This one is big and to my memory it gets bigger as the water gets higher. Many of the other drops wash out. Not Rubber. This picture is the leading end of an 18-foot Chubasco gear boat, blasting its way through the wave and making its way out of the main drop. Big fun. Great river.

Rhett Creek on the Main Salmon

At the end of the season, usually late August/early September, guests would go back to reality and the guides could take a trip, if they had a nice owner and the gear was still local. I did. Vuerle Duerden owned the company and was great to work for. At the time, the gear stayed at our warehouse in Salmon year-round. So here we are on a late season trip. Dave and Laurie (pictured) were two guides from the American River that came up and floated the Salmon with us. Great trip as I remember. The beaches on the Salmon and on the Middle Fork are stupendous. By the way, the only other place I have seen beaches rivaling the Salmon River are on the Lower Wisconsin River, from Sauk City on down to the confluence with the Mississippi. I suppose the Colorado has some nice beaches but I have never been down that creek.

a wavetrain on the Main Salmon

The five days you spend on the Main Salmon are going to be some of the best days ever. They were for me. This was one of my favorite stretches. If memory serves correctly, this rapid, John Hancock, was just above James Moore's old homestead.

I loved it then and miss it now.