Traveling West through Idaho

 We had just started in Idaho on Saturday and realized we still had to pass through it, as well as Oregon and Washington to make the family reunion in Washington by Sunday evening.  It was quite fortunate that we had made motel reservations for each night, so the miles that were necessary to cover each day had been all figured into our goal of making it to the reunion in time.  

 

We continued to view mountains as we drove on the Sawtooth Mountain Scenic Byway.  And driving through the Ponderosa Pine Scenic Byway we saw a sobering reminder of the devastation of forest fires.  It seemed to us that what we were viewing was a fairly recent forest fire, although probably not of this year.  We did experience smoky skies and air later in parts of Oregon, Washington and Montana.

 

                                       

At the border between Idaho and Oregon we saw signs for Hell's Canyon.  We were tempted to check it out.  Seemed a very unwise thing to do, given it was late Saturday afternoon.  So we took the Seven Devils access drive, which was a gravel road.  Another mistake there, but we had read that the canyon had the deepest river gorge in the United States and was 2,000 higher than the Grand Canyon.  Also that the Snake River running through it was world famous for its white water rafting.  Seemed important enough to check out.  We reached a mile 7 marker, stopped and pondered what to do next.  A group of people ( I would say they were about our age, maybe a bit younger) came toward us on several all terrain vehicles.  They came from a campground which was atop the canyon.  We asked how much further we had to go to reach the top of the canyon.  They said we still had about 12 miles to go yet, and encourage us to keep going.  There was no way that we wanted to go any further because of the rocky road!  We decided instead to head back down and stop where we could to view the canyon. 

                                          

There were no scenic overlooks on this road through the canyon, we just pulled off the road wherever there were breaks in the trees lining the road.  We were most certainly on the wrong road to access the canyon!  Coming off Seven Devils road we came to Half Way to Heaven Lane and I chuckled, are we talking heaven or hell here?  There is also a Hell's Gate State Park in the area.   Any which way anyone would choose to view it, any natural scenic area is certainly heaven to me.  Researching the canyon later I learned that the earliest white settlers called it Hell's Canyon because they unsuccessfully tried to tame the Snake river which flowed through it..

                                         

   Shortly after leaving Hell's Canyon I saw a interesting roadside sign:  "Salmon lives matter, give a dam".   There were also signs directing us to Riggins, Idaho- "White water capital of the world".  However, we headed to Lewiston Oregon, our stop for the night. We arrived there rather late, but it had been another interesting day on our way west.