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Now let's all watch a bunch of baby Tasmanian devils running around like, well, Tasmanian devils...

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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, November 3, 2023 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Smile: Friday, November 3, 2023

 Now let's all watch a bunch of baby Tasmanian devils running around like, well, Tasmanian devils...

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

[{"type":"text","text":"Frank Canton was known for his eyes. "}]

Rancher Elmer Brock claimed that Canton had "yellow coyote eyes." Edward Burnett, a rancher who also knew him well, said that when Canton got his steely eye on a man that settled it.

“Canton carried a gun, perhaps sometimes two of them,” Burnett said. “I never knew of his using one. His eye was sufficient.”

Canton was also a man with a secret identit

 admitted his real name was Joe Horner. 

According to Margaret Brock Hanson in her book “Powder River Country,” Canton had gone on a cattle drive through Kansas when he was a teenager in 1869. On his way home through Texas, he found trouble.

“The stories vary as to the adventures of these boys,” Hanson wrote. “But it seems that they got to Jacksboro where they all got liquored up and tried to shoot up the town.”

Near Jacksboro was Fort Richardson. Hanson said the story she heard was that Buffalo soldiers tried to arrest the cowboys and some were killed. The boys escaped and headed west to unsettled country. 

[{"type":"text","text":"At Comanche, Texas, they robbed a bank."}]

“Evidently, young Joe Horner was not in on the robbery and was left behind when the other boys left town in a hurry,” Hanson said. “Therefore, Joe was the only one who was arrested.”

Another story was that Horner could not reveal his alibi without compromising a girl of good repute. 

He was tried, convicted and given a long jail sentence. Horner was said to have escaped with the help of the girl or her family. Other rumors said the jailer’s daughter became enamored with him and helped him escape. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Working for the Association"}]

In Canton’s autobiography “Frontier Trails”, there is no mention of 

 as a teenager or even that he changed his name. He does write about joining a big cattle drive when he was 17 in the spring of 1869, and about subsequent cattle drives.   

By 1878, the fugitive accepted a position with the Wyoming Stock Raisers’ Association as field inspector, with headquarters at Cheyenne.

“My duties were to take charge of the criminal work on the range, protect the interests of members of the Association, recover stolen property, and furnish evidence against stock thieves,” Canton wrote in his memoirs.

He was sent to the Yellowstone River country in Montana, with headquarters at Miles City. He then investigated a report that the Crow Indians were killing some of the association’s cattle and selling the beef for elk meat.

Canton said he took advantage of the trip to look over the battleground where Gen. Custer and 278 men were killed two years earlier at Little Big Horn.

“History calls this the 'Custer Massacre', but according to the Indian custom, I would call it a fair fight,” Canton said. “Custer made the first attack on the Indians and after that they had to fight and they certainly did fight to a finish.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"City Thugs"}]

When Canton arrived in Montana, the railroad ended in Miles City. The only way to travel west was by horse or stagecoach.

Canton said the railroad company furnished free transportation from the East to all laborers. 

se criminal element in the big cities took them up on the offer.

“The result was that the country west of Miles City, Montana, was soon overrun with the most desperate gang of cut-throats that ever went unhung,” Canton said.

He complained that the cattle thieves and the stage robbers along the Yellowstone were bad enough, but when this bunch of city thugs was turned loose, law-abiding citizens were surrounded by unbearable conditions.

“The officers were brave and determined, and did their duty, but there were not enough of them,” Canton said. “The actual residents in Montana then took a hand in the game.”

According to Canton, vigilante committees were organized and second warnings were never issued.

“If the first warning was not obeyed, you would probably find several dead bodies hanging to telegraph poles,” Canton said. “The vigilantes soon ran the crooks out of the towns.”

Granville Stuart, president of the Montana Stock Association, then recruited 50 cowboys in a war of extermination against the criminals on the range and along the Yellowstone, Musselshell and Missouri rivers.  

The criminals who escaped were said to hav

Canton moved from Miles City in 1880 and settled at Buffalo, Wyoming, still in the employ of the Wyoming Stock Association. He homesteaded 480 acres 

iles southwest of Buffalo at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains, where he began farming and stock raising.

“It was the best rendezvous for outlaws that I have ever seen,” he said. “And they were there, plenty of them.” 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Elected Sheriff"}]

Burnett, the rancher who knew Canton well, said the high life in the little adolescent city of Buffalo was altogether too much for the sheriff and deputy.

“The County Commissioners could not put them out of office, so they put in Frank Canton as deputy sheriff and stock inspector,” Burnett said. “He called to him a little sawed-off Texan of the name of Jim Enochs, and they hung a man or two and then things settled down nice and quiet.”

Canton was elected sheriff of Johnson County in 1882. He appointed John McDermott as undersheriff to take charge of the office and hired 18 field deputies.

“I had but little time to stay in my office for the next two years, for I was in charge of the field work myself, and in the saddle most of the time,” Canton said.

Burnett said Canton was sheriff for two terms and could have had a third, but he thought McDermott was entitled to the office so he did not run.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Neighbor Rancher"}]

Burnett, according to the Wyoming State Archives, was a native of Durham, England. He immigrated to Texas where, in 1880, he joined a trail herd bound for Wyoming. 

In Johnson County, Burnett settled on the Forty-One Ranch near Buffalo, which became one of the largest cattle ranches in the Powder River country.

“After Canton went out of office, he lived on a farm adjoining me,” Burnett said. “Cattle stealing and killing beef got bad.”

Burnett dug for coal about two miles away. One morning, he

 “A beef has been killed in those hills where you dig your coal,” Canton said. “Let’s go and look it up.”

Burnett said he saddled his own horse, Angel Eyes, and off they went. They found the head and hide of the beef and circled around looking for trail signs. When they got together again, Burnett asked Canton if he had found anything.

Canton produced the sleeve of an old shirt and said, “When we find the rest of this shirt, there will be a hanging.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Burnett looked at the shred of shirt."}]

“That’s a piece of an old shirt of mine,” he said. “My wife tied up a lunch for me the last load of coal I dug. The rest of the shirt is at home."

Years afterward, Burnett told this story to a neighbor cowman who said, “What was the brand on that beef you killed?” 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Leaving Wyoming"}]

After he left the sheriff’s office, Canton returned to his job with the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. Soon after, he became involved in the Johnson County War on behalf of his employers.

On April 9, 1892, it was Canton who led the Regulators to the KC Ranch, where the ensuing battle ended in the deaths of Nick Ray and Nate Champion.

[{"type":"text","text":"Ray was shot and killed in the opening minutes. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Champion killed at least four of the Regulators and wounded others. "}]

At 5 p.m., Canton set the house on fire. Champion burst out of the house firing his Winchester rifle and was shot 28 times. 

Champion had taken his boots off, symbolically not dying with “his boots on,” a term used to describe the death of an outlaw, according to historian Clay Gibbons.  

Two days later a huge posse, led by Sheriff Angus, surrounded the Regulators at the TA Ranch. Fortunately for Canton, the U.S. Cavalry's arrival rescued him from having to surrender. 

The newspapers portrayed Canton and the others in a favorable light because of the influences of his employers.

Canton, like the other Regulators, was freed. He left Wyoming

He eventually became adjutant general for the Oklahoma National Guard. It was there that Canton confessed that he was Horner, and the governor of Texas granted him a pardon.

Despite Canton’s tactics and cold eyes that Burnett said would have made Canton a good banker, the rancher ended his own memoirs about Canton with praise.

“As a neighbor, Frank Canton was one of the best,” Burnett said. “He had the greatest virtue of all which is Charity.”

Frank Canton and Johnson County War 7 25 26

<title>Wyoming History: Ruthless Sheriff Needed A Secret Identity From Cattle Rustlers | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Johnson County Frank Canton was so ruthless with cattle rustlers and quick with a gun that he needed a secret identity. “If the first warning was not obeyed, you would probably find several dead bodies hanging to telegraph poles,” he once said.

Wyoming History: Ruthless Sheriff Needed A Secret Identity From Cattle Rustlers

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

He was a collector of cars, coins, guns, clocks, rocks, friends and anything else that claimed his interest.

And if there wasn’t a garage on his property, he built one.

A year after the passing of Dale Corkill his widow, Patricia, and stepdaughter, Amanda Lake, are trying to find good homes for two of his four-wheeled possessions. 

He and Patricia closed on a house in Glenrock, sent three cars to its garage, and then he died of cancer at a Riverton hospice on May 21, 2025, a week before he was to move in.

Patricia Corkill said she did not realize how many cars her husband of 26 years owned at the time he died, but she pulled out a stack of titles she had to get transferred into her name.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He had them stored in various garages."}]

“It took half a day at the clerk’s office to get everything switched over,” she said. “Then I had to go back. You should have seen the no-smiley faces.”

She just sold his 1941 Chevy Master Deluxe to a man from Denver. Now there just remains a 1925 Model T Opera car and a 1931 Model A Ford with a rumble seat.

“The Opera car has this shade in the back and it would also have a vase,” Patricia said. “The driver or whoever could put a flower in it.”

She said the front seat looks like a couch and noted the cars then were built for smaller people than are typical today.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Parade Car"}]

Lake said her stepdad would drive the Model T in parades in Dubois and Lander. His passenger had to pump a non-original water-filled squirt bottle with a hose attached to keep the little four-cylinder engine and radiator from overheating at the parade pace.

Patricia Corkill said when her husband bought the Model T, as well as the Model A, they were already restored. But he purchased other cars and equipment that would require his skills as a mechanic and electrical whiz.

Mostly, she believes her husband purchased the cars because he enjoyed history and old things.

The couple met at the Dave Johnston Power Plant, where Dale Corkill worked for more than 30 years as an instrument technician.

He was born in Lander and spent his high school years in Casper, graduating from Natrona County High School in the same class as the late Vice President Dick Cheney. 

“He liked him of course and Lynn also,” Patricia Corkill said. “We went to a class reunion and I got to shake hands with him. I didn’t wash my hand for a week.”

Afte Dale's retirement from PacificCorp, he spent three years working for Basin Electric.

Patricia said when she retired from the Dave Johnston Power Plant, he left the Wheatland job and they moved to a cabin he had owned for several years and spent the next 17 years in that region.

Dale knew all of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and Shoshone National Forest trails and sites of interest. He often acted as a guide for friends and others on snowmobile trips or four-wheeler excursions.

“I guess you could probably call him the original Airbnb person up on Union Pass taking care of people’s cabins and stuff for them,” Lake said. “Not everybody lives there year-round.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Skilled Mechanic"}]

Patricia Corkill said her husband was the type of guy who fixed nearly anything: Snowmobiles, four wheelers, older cars, tractors. She said he was raised in a one-bedroom house in Casper and his dad was a carpenter and mechanic.

After graduation from high school, Dale went to Casper College and graduated with a degree in electronics. Once at the Dave Johnston Power Plant in his later years he became a teacher for other operators and even after retirement would go back to put on classes, Patrica said.

Lake said he was always a man on the move working on equipment, fixing clocks, hunting rocks, or helping others.

Patricia said whenever they moved to a new home, if the property didn’t have a garage our outbuildings he built one.

The couple from 2017 to 2025 lived in Riverton and then planned to move back to Glenrock despite his illness.

“When we bought this place, he saw the garage and said ‘let’s buy it,’” Patricia said. “Before he even came into the house.”

Besides building garages, Dale loved to listen to older people tell their stories and was ready hand to help them with projects — helping one Douglas-area widow and friend with her estate after her husband died.

When the couple prepared to move from Riverton to Glenrock, it took two auctions to downsize from the all the collection of equipment, cars, rocks, clocks and other items.

They had a three-car garage, three sheds, and a big shop full of tools, cars, rocks and more.

“He was a man that loved history and enjoyed seeing it in the old gadgets,” Patricia said. “You have no idea how much stuff we had to get rid of because we were downsizing so much. It hurt him bad, but he knew that he was not able to take care of it anymore.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Rock Collection"}]

Patricia Corkill said her husband’s rock collection that included polished stones as well as just rocks made more money than the first auction that included equipment, tools and household items.

She retains some of the rocks they collected as well as other unique items such as lamps used in the Glenrock coal mines, a razor sharpener, and arrowheads from all over Wyoming.

Patricia said her husband loved going to auctions.

“You could show him something and he could tell you the story behind it,” Lake said.

Mother and daughter posted the last of Dale Corkill’s wheeled collection they want to sell on social media sites a couple weeks ago.

 features wooden spoked wheels, a throttle on the column, and a battery so there's no need to twist a crank to start it — though that’s available for back up. The red-bulb hood ornament/radiator cap apparently helps the driver keep his hands from getting burned when removing the cap.

Patricia Corkill said the engine on the Model T was replaced by a previous owner, so the number does not match the original title.

 features a winged bird in flight as its combination hood ornament and radiator cap, spoked rims, spare tires with Ford covers on both sides of the car, and a metal carry rack that folds out off the back behind the rumble seat. The little four-cylinder engine boasts 4,635 miles on its odometer.

The last time both cars were fired up and driven was during a parade three years ago.

“We just want to find good homes for them,” Patricia Corkill said.

Model T and mug 7 25 26

<title>Glenrock Widow Trying To Find Homes For Husband's 1925 Model T And 1931 Model A | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Glenrock widow has stories to tell about her late husband who was a prolific collector of cars, rocks, clocks, guns, gadgets, and much more. A year after his death, she's still trying to "find good homes" for his 1925 Model T Opera car and 1931 Model A.

Glenrock Widow Trying To Find Homes For Husband's 1925 Model T And 1931 Model A

Welsch mug

Jeff Welsch

Outdoors

A few hundred yards downstream, after 70 miles of twists and turns and memories and restoration of a base human spirit, a white pickup truck appeared beyond the vertical lip of a canyon wall on river right and disappeared swiftly behind another tower of rock on the left.

Almost in unison, 22 hearts — one for each first-time floater on the revered emerald gem that is central Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, including and especially mine — sank.

The truck harkened an inevitability we all understood and accepted, but still dreaded as this jarring reality loomed ever larger each day.

We were plying the last stretch of the crown jewel of America’s wild rivers and, in my case, closing the book on an elusive spiritual pursuit 40 years in the making.

An odyssey that began six days earlier with a backcountry flight into a dirt airstrip was now a few half-hearted oar strokes from takeout at busy Cache Bar, after a left turn and one more mighty rapid on the Main Salmon River.

Silence engulfed us, save for the ever-fainter roar of the last of the Middle Fork’s 100-plus rapids, the chirp of chukars pecking at bugs on a boulder-strewn shore, and the goodbye echoes of wind whispering off canyon walls that towered above us like granite cathedrals.

Our bearded and tanned trip leader Murph, no stranger to this moment and its emotional swings, swiveled his head toward the four other yellow rafts and read our collective minds like a seasoned therapist.

“Welcome,” he announced, “to the most depressing place on Earth.”

Murph himself was wrestling with those emotions, as he’d conceded he would when he first gripped his oars at the Indian Creek launch site in the heart of America’s largest contiguous wilderness area.

He pirouetted his raft 180 degrees and pointed it upstream, putting the growing vehicle traffic out of sight if not out of mind, and we all followed suit. We gazed one final time up the waters we’d covered, contemplating a landscape unmatched in the Lower 48 states.

Even the group’s six 11-to-14-year-old kids, who’d spent the morning playfully smacking the water’s surface with paddles and gleefully celebrating drenching descents through rapids with foreboding names such as Devil’s Tooth and Foreplay and House of Rocks, solemnly rested those same paddles across their knees.

No heart was at once more melancholy and yet full as the one belonging to the second-oldest member of the expedition.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Mine."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Unaltered For Millennia"}]

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is born at the confluence of gin-clear Marsh and Bear Valley creeks on the eastern edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. The river carves a serpentine chasm through the craggy Idaho Batholith and, climactically, Impassable Canyon, the third deepest gorge in North America.

Its waters plunge an average of 30 feet per mile, producing nearly continuous rapids over its 104 miles.

Its flow, unaltered for millennia, is regulated purely and solely by Mother Nature — no dams, no agricultural pumps, no diversions, no community water systems, no wastewater effluent, no rip-rap and no spans save for a handful of suspension bridges for foot and equine trail traffic.

The trout fishing is world-class, the hot springs restorative, the rapids exhilarating as well as 

 with one notable and intensely personal exception 

To safeguard the Middle Fork’s fragile integrity, a scant seven launches per day are allowed between commercial and private trips. The odds of the average citizen winning the Middle Fork lottery are about 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for roughly 350 slots each year.

President Jimmy Carter wasn’t encumbered by such long odds in August 1978 when he floated the Middle Fork, along the way instilling in his wife, Rosalynn, a passion for fly-fishing. Two years later he would sign the Central Idaho Wilderness Act into law, the name soon to change to Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

“I think if I had to pick out the three or four best days of my life in politics, it was the time I spent going down the Salmon River by raft two summers ago. This was a delightful trip,” Carter said at the 1980 signing. “The River of No Return, encompassing the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, is indeed one of our nation’s treasures.”

Even the Colorado River of the Grand Canyon, for all its aura and remoteness, is bookended by dams, its flows dictated by the demands and whims of far-flung water users.

The Middle Fork is as pure as the driven snows that blanket its upper reaches and feed it, along with the dozens of creeks that sustain and nurture it.

The mere utterance of the words “Middle Fork” moves riverkeepers worldwide to genuflect.

A Middle Fork descent became a vision quest for me a few years after Carter’s visit, when as a 20-something Idaho journalist and budding river enthusiast I was struck by the local reverence for it.

Grown man-card-carrying, beef-eating, Idaho-bred men admitted to weeping at the sight of those same anti-climactic trucks and boat trailers.

While awaiting my turn, I rafted and kayaked many of the West’s great whitewater rivers — Idaho’s Main Salmon, Lower Salmon, South Fork of the Payette, South Fork of the Boise, and even the impossibly elusive Selway with its single launch per day; Oregon’s Rogue, Deschutes, McKenzie and Illinois; the Alberton Gorge section on Montana’s Clark Fork; and my splashy introduction to rafting at age 22 in Lunch Counter and the Big Kahuna rapids on Wyoming’s Snake — measuring each against a vision of the Middle Fork adventure certain to come.

Yet year after year, hope gave way to futility.

The lottery sneered at my every annual application. Speed dials in hopes of a rare cancellation were fruitless. Invitations from the friends who’d occasionally struck Middle Fork gold were always ill-timed.

And, of course, there were those all-consuming daily demands such as parenting and work.

Compromising my chances, for many years testosteronal stubbornness prohibited me from even considering one of the commercial trips, which I derided as for soft East and West Coast elitists.

Over time, I’d begun to concede in the twilight of my own serpentine journey that my dream would always be just that, and that any Middle Fork floats would be relegated to vicarious YouTube fantasies.

Then, for the Christmas of my 66th year, my wife, Sherry, herself once a river rat who’d said “yes” to our engagement on one Rogue River descent and “yes” to matrimony at the same remote lodge on the same day a year later, handed a laptop computer displaying an invoice to my son Matt, whose eyes knowingly widened.

“Do you think he’d like this?” she asked with an impish grin.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Matt nodded vigorously."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He nodded even more emphatically."}]

Matt handed me the computer and my eyes moistened as I saw the words: Middle Fork Adventures.

After 40 years, I’d finally won the Middle Fork lottery.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"No Outside World Access"}]

On July 15, after the short flight from Stanley to Indian Creek, I wandered down the launch ramp. For the first time, I dipped a sandal into the waters of a stream I’d touched only with my eyes from 30,000 feet.

“Holy waters,” I said to a guide I’d just met, and he nodded with a smile.

For the next six days, we would have no access to the outside world, save for the seven-person crew’s emergency satellite phone and a brief stop at a pastoral lodge and hunting camp called Loon Creek Ranch.

It is one of several guest ranches and busy airstrips grandfathered into “The Church”, a counter-intuitive concession nevertheless necessary to persuade politicians that this national treasure merited protections under The Wilderness Act of 1964.

At Loon Creek, Starlink made Apple Pay and thus the purchase of huckleberry ice cream possible in a tiny white “store” with mule-deer antlers above the door, across a yard from the horses and pack mules in a nearby corral.

Cell phones were otherwise of no use except for time, photos/video and satellite mapping until they inevitably died.

For the 22 of us, the dopamine urge to doom scroll on social media each morning left our fingertips with surprising ease the moment we took off from Stanley and banked across the flanks of the Sawtooths. Early pining for World Cup results also tapered quickly.

A lanky 14-year-old boy from Seattle, paddling alongside Matt in an inflatable kayak, or “ducky”, offered that his baseball team was in the state playoffs.

“But I’d rather be here,” he said, his parents beaming later when the sentiment was relayed to them.

Day after day, we navigated rapids, hiked to Sheepeater pictographs, soaked in hot springs, drank straight from cold springs, caught wild cutthroat trout, climbed to waterfalls, poked around abandoned cabins once inhabited by crusty hermits, admired bighorn sheep and bald eagles and mule deer, and sat contemplatively in the mist of a cool grotto surrounded by 500-foot walls.

And from dawn to dusk, in our rafts and on our hikes and at lunch stops and around the campfire, we engaged in a lost art.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"We talked."}]

An eclectic group from each corner of the country and varied walks of life converged and, for a week, we became family.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Entering The Cheese Grater"}]

On the penultimate day, just a few hundred yards from our final camp at Otter Bar, I plopped into a ducky for the final time and followed Matt into a Class III rapid called Cliffside that’s notorious for “munching” inflatable kayaks.

Its name comes from the bony cliff on the left known as “Cheese Grater Wall”. As fate would have it, the rapid is most challenging at the present and otherwise ideal flow of 2.5 feet; it’s easier to skirt at higher water in the spring and slows to a relative trickle later in the summer.

“I have seen more botched runs and wall crashes in this rapid than any other,” wrote Matt Leidecker in “Middle Fork of the Salmon River: A Comprehensive Guide”, as if he knew before I did that I would indeed one day float this river.

I deftly navigated the first wave, riding its crest like a cork, then instantly knew my fate was sealed when a side wave surged off Cheese Grater, pushed the nose of my ducky hard right, and left me helplessly parallel to another wave that upended me into the maelstrom.

Down I went, gashing my shin on a submerged rock, before eventually emerging between waves long enough to claim a single hurried breath. Down I went again only to re-emerge moments later in time to gasp for another breath between waves and see I was in a headlong rush toward the Grater.

I raised my hands, briefly flashed on whether a ledge might suck me underneath the wall, pushed off and was summoned into the depths a final time. Upon my third emergence I managed two breaths and spied calmer water a few smaller waves ahead.

“Are you OK?” Murph shouted from his rescue raft, shifting from first responder back to boat captain. “Just stay calm.”

I nodded, and moments later another guide pulled me by my life jacket into the back of an oar raft, shaken but otherwise unbruised except for my shin and my ego.

“Welcome to the Salmon River Swim Team,” Taylor said with a grin once he knew I hadn’t inhaled a pint of Middle Fork Pale Ale. “It’s an exclusive club. We’ve all been there.”

My penance came that night in what guides call “booty beer.” I had to announce around the campfire what I did wrong (listened to the guides tee-hee), what I’d do different (not follow Matt tee-hee) and what I’d learned (people were legit scared when my yellow helmet twice vanished into the depths) before a rite of passage required me to guzzle a 12-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon from toe to heel out of my river sandal.

It was, fittingly perhaps, the first time I’d ever flipped either a raft or so-called IK, giving me a kinship with this river unlike any other. The Middle Fork had taken something from me while at the same time giving something back.

The next morning, as we reached the confluence of the Middle Fork and Main Salmon, we grudgingly turned our rafts back toward the transition zone and what our culture curiously calls “the real world.”

“Thank you, Middle Fork!” Murph yelled one last time, looking over his shoulder up the canyon and saluting the restorative powers of the river and its wildness.

From the back of an oar boat, Matt and I watched an eagle talon a trout from the depths before we stood and held on tight for a final bucking bronc ride through Class IV Cramer Creek Rapid.

As we sat back down on the tube, the ramp at Cache Bar and its throngs of milling people inching ever closer across another placid emerald gem, Matt turned and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Well,” he said, “you finally made it.”

One of the most difficult rivers to gain access to float is the pristine Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The odds are 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for 350 slots each year. After trying for 40 years, Cowboy State Daily's Jeff Welsch won the lottery

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