River And Road

the land and water is really there!

2011-08-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Hi all

So while the majority of my chapters are fiction, the land in which it takes place is REAL. Salmon, ID does exist, the Salmon River and the Middle Fork of the Salmon do exist. Lost Trail Pass exists. Highway 93 really does run from the northern border of MT all the way down to the southern border of the US with Mexico. It is a lonely road too. Sadly one that many never take the time to experience. All the backroads I write about in the book exist. Ghost towns, wide spots in the road with a cafe, tumbleweeds and amazing sunsets. They all exist. Go there, see those places!

Success on the Kindle

2009-11-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

It is gratifying to know that people out there with Kindles in hand are somehow navigating the immense and limitless virtual halls of Amazon and finding my book chapters.

Thank you for those purchases! If any of you read this, I would love to hear or read what you think of the chapter(s) that you purchased.

The goal is to publish the entire book. If I can get in touch with you early purchasers, I would be happy to send the entire copy to you, when it becomes available.

thx
Jeff
email address is the blog name plus the "@gmail.com"

the beach landing below Moore's cabin on the Main Salmon

2009-08-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

This is a small, two boat, fall trip going down the Salmon. Great time of the year on an unbelievable river. Just above this beach is a small bench on which James Moore built his homestead, which ultimately ended up as quite a place, serving all sorts of things to the local mining and farming people.It's all quiet now, but it is something to imagine life on this river a hundred years ago. From what I've read it was a pretty lively place.

Chapters of the book -

2009-08-11T08:33:00.001-07:00

Three chapters are up and live now. They are exclusively for the Kindle and are available at Amazon. Other venues are coming as they pop up. Happily, people are somehow finding my humble tome in the vast wilderness that are the virtual stacks of the Amazon store. Getting discovered, or, more likely, getting my book in front of the people who are interested in stories like is BY FAR the hardest thing to do. This is proving to be like a grain of sand that someone is looking for and just happens to find. No reviews so far. I hope, gentle readers, that someone will soon write something nice in the way of a review!

Down the River Up the Road Chapter One

Down the River Up the Road Chapter Two

Down the River Up the Road Chapter Three

River dinner

2009-07-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T19:56:00.001-07:00

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.

one more serial note

2009-06-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

Max Berry has taken serial publishing one step further. With his book Machine Man, the author is not only doing the serial thing, he is doing one page at a time and releasing that into the wild. It seems to be working for him. He just had a publisher buy the rights to it, apparently based on the success of his by the page experiment.

fun example of serial publishing

2009-06-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across an interesting article about serial publishing, which is the route I'm choosing to take with my book. The article in the link talks about author Jeff Kinney and the serial efforts he made with his book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Looks like a great summertime kid read and it certainly reads like a great DIY author's story as well.

Rafting the Salmon River

2009-05-31T06:27:00.000-07:00

A day on the Salmon River, with three clients about 20 years ago. Part of the memories that my book, Down The River Up the Road, is based on.

2009-05-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

Laissez le bon temps rouler!

I have always looked back on my time as a river guide in Idaho as a great time in life in one of the superb spots on this planet. It wasn't just the river, it was the small forgotten towns with the Main Street cafe, it was the ranchers in their plaid shirts, it was the mountain passes and the old gravel roads. IT was the sense of history that you felt when stumbling upon an old long since abandoned cabin, knowing that someone had lived in that desolate spot a hundred years before you.

I got lucky and made it out of the Midwest and saw some of this first hand. It inspired this book. But I really hope you all can get out and see it for yourself.

Down the River and Up the Road

2009-05-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

I started this blog to accompany my book, Down the River and Up the Road. For now, I'm doing my book a chapter at a time, formatted for Amazon's Kindle reader. The book is based on the experiences I had as a river guide on the Salmon River when I was in college. While the story is imagined, many of the places, names, and locations are real. When content I have fits what the story is telling, I'll post it here and make notes that fit with and support the Kindle book.

Kind of an experiment in serial reading supported by multi-media and memories, if you will.

The Salmon River, which is in central Idaho, and the country it is in, is absolutely stunning, at least to me. Aside from wife and kids, the time I spent on that river was phenomenal and continues some 20 years later to provide some very pleasant memories.