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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, Roslyn, 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” move 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 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 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 a placid emerald gem, Matt turned and put his arm around my shoulder.

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

Yes, I finally made it, and my heart, though still tinged with melancholy and a sense of loss that still has me off-balance as I write, was full at long last. 

Middle Fork rafts

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

<title>40 Years Later, Idaho's Middle Fork Of The Salmon Reveals Its Restorative Powers | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Forty years after first seeing the reverence for Idaho's Middle Fork of the Salmon River, the author finally gets his day on the crown jewel of America's wild rivers. Over six wild and wet days, it proved every bit as restorative as he'd dreamed.

40 Years Later, Idaho's Middle Fork Of The Salmon Reveals Its Restorative Powers

Anna-Louise Jackson

Business & Tourism

Business

With clear skies and temperatures flirting with 90 degrees, it’s a perfect weekend to enjoy a private island on Montana’s Flathead Lake. 

The only problem is you’ll still need $72 million to snatch it off the market.

While a lot has changed in the past four years, that’s not the case for 

 for Cromwell Island, a 350-acre island that’s home to an unfinished 45,000-square-foot French-style villa described as “reminiscent of Versailles” on the west side of the lake.

As anyone who has some experience in the real estate market knows, most sellers will entertain serious offers.

Whether one of those offers will strike the fancy of this particular owner, however, is a different matter.

“I guess time will tell where we make a deal, but the asking price is $72 million and that has not changed,” said Bill McDavid, the listing agent for the property with Missoula-based Hall and Hall.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"New Neighbors"}]

One thing that has changed is that the future owners of Cromwell Island could have some jet-set neighbors in the future.

That’s because Discovery Land Co., the developers behind the swanky Jackson’s 3 Creek Ranch and the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana, have proposed a 359-unit subdivision on 1,800 acres in Lakeside, less than 20 miles as the crow flies from the island.

But that proposed development — dubbed Territory 1889, a nod to the year Montana became a state — has run into some issues.

A local judge paused the water permitting process last month and some locals are fighting the development through the nonprofit Citizens for a Better Flathead.

Still, if that development proceeds as planned, it could help move Cromwell Island off the market for its $72 million asking price.

McDavid said it’s common for some people who buy into those sorts of enclaves to eventually decide they’d like a little more space and privacy, so they start looking for property nearby while continuing to enjoy the perks of a club membership.

“I could see the same thing happening here,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Languishing On The Market"}]

Another thing that admittedly has changed in the past four years is that Montana’s once-high-flying real estate market has come back to earth somewhat, and it’s taking longer for homes to move. 

As of May, Montana homes were on the market for a median of 85 days before going under contract, according to Redfin. That’s about a month longer than it was taking to move the median listing back in 2022.

While the Cromwell Island property is admittedly an outlier in so many regards, its extended stay on the market is actually not so abnormal.

One of Wyoming’s luxury home listing, the 

 in Teton County, has been on the market for $65 million for about 700 days, or just shy of two years.

Meanwhile, it’s been almost a year since the country’s most expensive listing hit the market — a 74-acre property with a private lake in Aspen, Colorado, that’s listed for a cool $300 million.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"No Changes To Property"}]

Whoever does, eventually, buy Cromwell Island will be able to boast that they own the largest privately held island in freshwater.

They also can see out the vision of its prior owner, Bob Lee, a famous collector, conservationist and explorer who founded Hunting World in the 1960s and bought the island more than 40 years ago with his wife, Anne Brockinton Lee.

Nothing about the island or structures has changed in the past year since Cowboy State Daily 

The island is accessible year-round thanks to a custom-built barge and underwater agitators that ensure a less than 10-minute journey to nearby Dayton, even during periods when parts of the lake might freeze over.

In addition to the unfinished villa, there’s another structure on the island, a boat dock that can accommodate a 70-foot yacht, a shooting range, plenty of wildlife neighbors, and a front row seat to nearby Wild Horse Island, the largest island on Flathead Lake.

And in what’s thus far been a smoke-free and sunny summer, owners can enjoy what McDavid did on his most-recent visit.

“It was gorgeous,” he said. “It was a great day to be out there.”

Cromwell Island 7 25 26

<title>Maybe This Is The Year Someone Will Finally Buy $72 Million Montana Private Island | Cowboy State Daily</title>

It's been four years without a buyer for Montana’s most expensive luxury estate, a 350-acre private island with a huge unfinished 45,000-square-foot villa. The $72 million property also features a boat dock that can accommodate a 70-foot yacht.

Maybe This Is The Year Someone Will Finally Buy $72 Million Montana Private Island

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Around Wyoming

[{"type":"text","text":"Some people collect souvenirs."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Rick Bonander collected adventures."}]

The 74-year-old Casper businessman has spent a lifetime following whatever lay beyond the next ridge, whether that meant getting lost in the Montana mountains as a boy, building one of Wyoming's most successful pipe companies, or tracking elephants, lions and Marco Polo sheep across six continents.

[{"type":"text","text":"The adventures now surround him."}]

Bonander is difficult to miss. Tall and broad-shouldered with a barrel chest, bright blue eyes and a neatly trimmed white mustache, he greets visitors with an easy smile and the confidence of someone who's seen enough of the world to know that almost everything eventually becomes a good story.

He settles into a hand-carved chair as thousands of glass eyes stare back from every direction.

Outside his home's picture windows, Wyoming stretches toward the horizon.

Inside, a crocodile lounges across the stone floor on a wooden peg leg Bonander built after discovering the reptile had lost one of its own. A leopard crouches from an upper ledge. A rhinoceros stands nearby. Cape buffalo from Zimbabwe and antelope from Africa fill every corner.

[{"type":"text","text":"Elephant feet have become leather-covered stools. "}]

"My trophy room doesn't mean anything to anybody else," he said. "But to me, I could sit out here with a drink and just daydream about each and every animal and the hunt. Every one of them I can replay in my mind."

[{"type":"text","text":"For Bonander, the room isn't about what he killed."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"It's about where life took him."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Adventure Calls"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bonander was raised to wander. "}]

Growing up in Bozeman, Montana, he spent weekends hunting, fishing and camping with his two younger brothers. He shot his first deer at 8 years old and, by 14, was hunting on his own.

One snowy afternoon, after following a wounded deer farther than he realized, he became hopelessly lost in the Montana backcountry. Darkness settled in. Panic followed.

Sit down. Think. Figure out where you are. 

He found his bearings and walked himself home, carrying a lesson that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

That same willingness to venture into the unknown has followed him since. 

After earning a construction engineering degree from Montana State University and serving as a military police dog handler at a nuclear missile site in Washington, Bonander moved to Casper.

[{"type":"text","text":"Five years later, he gambled on himself."}]

In 1982, armed with just $260 and a willingness to outwork everyone around him, he started Intermountain Pipe. Delivering casing to drilling rigs around the clock, he built what would become one of Wyoming's premier oilfield pipe companies.

His son now runs much of the business, but Bonander still comes to the office most days.

[{"type":"text","text":"Fifty years of experience, he says, is hard to replace."}]

Building a successful company satisfied the engineer in him, but it never quieted the explorer.

For years, he devoured books about Africa before finally deciding to take "just one" safari.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I thought I'd get it out of my system,\" he said."}]

Instead, he was planning the next trip before the airplane carrying him home had even landed. He returned to Africa more than 30 times. 

Over three decades, Bonander has hunted in countries stretching from Zimbabwe and Botswana to Tajikistan, Australia, Argentina, Scotland, Croatia and New Zealand.

[{"type":"text","text":"What keeps drawing him back?"}]

"The adventure," he said. "Getting to see new people, new places, new things."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Killer Elephant "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bonander never planned to hunt an elephant."}]

In 2002, he traveled to Zimbabwe hoping to pursue Cape buffalo and plains game when camp received word that a villager had been killed by a rogue bull elephant.

Years earlier, someone had tried to kill the animal with an AK-47. Instead, the bullets shattered its shoulder, destroyed much of its trunk and left it crippled. The elephant survived, but according to Bonander, it had become dangerously aggressive.

"It was missing a foot and a half of its trunk, and it was mean," Bonander said. "He wanted to kill people."

Zimbabwe wildlife officials asked whether Bonander wanted to help remove the elephant.

Trackers followed fresh prints through thick brush until they found the bull drinking from a sandy riverbed. Carrying a borrowed century-old .470 Nitro Express double rifle, Bonander eased to within about 35 yards.

[{"type":"text","text":"His first shot struck the elephant's shoulder."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The bull spun."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"His second shot hit the opposite shoulder."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The elephant staggered another 20 yards before collapsing."}]

For Bonander, it underscored something many Americans don't often see: in parts of Africa, hunting is also wildlife management. Dangerous animals, crop raiders and aging bulls are sometimes removed under government authority to protect both people and habitat.

[{"type":"text","text":"Nothing went to waste."}]

Villagers butchered the elephant where it fell, carrying the meat home to feed their families.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Accidental Giraffe "}]

By then, Bonander had hunted hippos, rhinoceroses, lions, elephants and more antelope species than he can easily count.

[{"type":"text","text":"One animal never interested him much."}]

Casper's Rick Bonander went to Africa once "to get it out of his system." Thirty-two trips later, the 74-year-old has tracked lions, hunted a man-killing elephant, took on a three-legged crocodile, and filled his home with memories from six continents.