The Bruneau River Expedition

Jonathan Hughes
Idaho Yesterdays
Winter, 1983

“In late June, I bumped into Len and Stan Miracle at a local ‘beer joint.’ The Miracle family consisted of a most upright old Baptist couple, a lovely daughter, and three rough and tough sons. The father and three boys, along with assorted uncles and cousins, were great outdoorsmen in the fashion of Idaho in those days. Weekends and holidays through the year were spent fly- fishing for trout and shooting ducks, pheasants, deer, and elk in season. The Miracles (at least the men) managed to spend a significant part of their lives camping out, despite filling regular and perfectly prosaic occupations in the little towns of southern Idaho. I had know the family for several years. They pressed me to ‘go down the Bruneau’ with them.”

“The reason for the escapade Len and Stan now proposed to me was simplicity itself. Len wanted to be a writer and had closed a deal with the western editor of Field and Stream to go through the canyon by boat and then write up the adventure. What kind of a boat? Len explained that the others had failed because they had attempted the canyon with rigid wood craft. The water and rocks made quick work of such boats. We would be using a five-man World War II rubber life raft that Len and Stan had just picked up at a local war-surplus outlet. They figured it would take three men to handle the boat in the river, one fore and two astern. There I was – young, strong, foolish, and free each week from Monday morning through Friday afternoon.”

“It was the sort of crazy adventure one found irresistible at the age of 22, so I agreed to go.”

“In addition to food, sleeping bags, and other supplies (including tiolet paper, which Stan thought a terribly ‘dude’ thing to take along), we packed fishing rods, pistols (for the snakes), a hatchet, a machete, a cooking pan, a coffee pot, a skillet, and metal eating utensils. Len took a camera with both color and black-and-white film. He intended that his story for Field and Stream include color pictures – a vain hope, as it turned out.”

“At the end of the second day we were dog tired. Late in the afternoon, we pulled up on a sandbar. The river had undercut the cliff opposite, forming a deep silent little pool. While I unpacked, made a fire, and started the coffee, Stan and Len landed nineteen beautiful trout for supper, keeping only the larger ones. Len had been taking pictures in black and white, and he took one of me lying on the rocks with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library edition) on my stomach. As a potential University of Washington economist, I had taken the great masterwork of economics along for fireside reading, but I was too tired to read anything, and it was too dark to read anyway. I still have the book oddly misshapen for reasons that will become apparent.”

“In the late afternoon (of the third day) we saw a dangerous spot ahead. Two giant rocks embraced the entire river, one above it and the second dipping down under the water and under the other rock. The entire river poured between them with enormous force, emerging into a deep pool on the other side.”

“Unwisely, we decided to try to ease the raft across the top of the swirling water. We suddenly lost control of the raft, and it was pushed under the overhanging rock by the raging water. I nearly went under with the raft while trying to save it, but Stan had grabbed my arm and held on for dear life until Len could come and help pull me back from the water’s terrible force. The inflated boat was stuck under water in the torrent, just barely visible. In it were all our provisions (together with The Wealth of Nations and the toilet paper) lashed to the canvas struts we had imagined on the first day would be our seats for the trip. We then did the only thing we could to save the situation. Len and Stan held my ankles while I took a deep breath and then partly deflated the raft by loosening the air valve under water. The raft, sleeping bags, and provisions then shot out from under the upper rock into the pool beyond.

We saved what we could (including The Wealth of Nations), but the toilet paper was a lost cause. It had indeed been a dude idea. The remains of the bread we patted into soggy tortillas and wrapped in a cloth – there was not much of it left. We found a few cans of beans and sup in shallow water. We could not locate our cooking or eating utensils, but we saved the fishing gear and Len’s camera. The color film in it was ruined, but the black-and-white roll was in a water-tight canister and we found it floating on the surface. Our sleeping bags also floated up alongside the partially deflated raft. We saved the machete (which I still have) and the pistols and ammunition.

We made a fire with a waterproof match Len had in his pocket (from a previous fishing expedition) and dried out our bedding. But Len pointed out that we had only a couple more waterproof matches. We had not considered the problem when we stocked up the previous week, so we were now stuck. We did retrieve a box of regular kitchen matches, totally waterlogged. After drying them by our fire, we found that each match was good only for a single spark, and we began lamely joking about the Indians making fires by rubbing dried sticks together. Could we do it? The prospect of only two more fires was depressing. It got distinctly cold at night, and we usually finished up the day wet and tired. What would we do without fire? We were far into the canyon, knowing for certain only that it ended at Bruneau and that, one way or another, we would have to go the distance. But we had no idea how far that might be. The canyon walls were sheer and very high. We knew we could not climb out from where we were and hike across the desert. For the moment the Bruneau expedition had to continue, despite the loss of most of our food.”

“When morning came we used our last waterproof match to make a soggy breakfast of tortillas and beans. We re-entered the Bruneau River not knowing what to expect next, having only the certain knowledge that we must by then have traveled a considerable distance. When lunch time came Stan, with his great instinct for innovation, gathered dry June grass, wadded it tightly, put it on a flat rock, bit the ends of two .22 cartridges, and carefully made a small pile of powder under the grass wad. Then, cupping one hand against the wind, he struck a non-waterproof match. The single spark ignited the powder, which in its turn, ignited the June grass. Voila! A fire! Even thirty-two years later I can recall our joy at the sight of the flames. We had hot soup and the last of the tortillas for lunch.”

“Just below that spot a warm springs entered the river and, by fly-casting, we quickly discovered a sad reality: no more trout. In the warmer water there seemed to be only whitefish and suckers, a prospect none of the three young Idahoans relished. We ended that day poling our way through an eerie, silent gorge in deep, still waters that ended with a long cataract. We heard the water roar echoing up the canyon long in advance with considerable dread because one of our pieces of information included a tale that someone had seen a ‘huge falls’ in the river from the rim far above. What if this were it and there was no way around it? In fact, we rode down the cataract, all three of us inside the raft, like kids at an amusement park. At the bottom we had a long spell of swimming ahead and lining the boat through the river course.

Each day the traveling seemed increasingly difficult. The stretches of easy going were few and far between. There had been a good deal of swimming ahead and lining the boat down between the boulders. We had, in fact, now been forced to portage several times – an exhausting chore, since we had to move the raft and our gear along in the rocks, brush, and fallen trees past the obstacle-filled stretches of the river. There had also been stretches where the river seemed to go partly into underground channels, leaving us with only a few inches of draft. We dragged and partly lifted the raft gingerly over those areas. We seemed to be wearing down physically. We slept that night on a rocky sandbar, utterly exhausted.

Also, we were getting hungry. We regretted not catching a sheep, but they were far behind us now. There seemed one obvious course of action open to us – we would shoot a deer. The wild game in the canyon, having never seen a man, had watched us indifferently for days. It would not be hard to get meat. Shooting deer with pistols, however, required considerable expertise – which we did not have. After blasting away at everything that was shaped like a deer, we landed at one point and chased a fawn up the side of the canyon until he was trapped. He doubled back. Stan and Len both missed him with the .22 pistols and my weapon misfired as the fawn passed a few feet from me. He rejoined his mother in perfect safety and we went back to the raft frustrated. An hour or so later, as the raft came around a bend, a doe and fawn stood on the bank above us. I grabbed the pistol and pulled the trigger. This time it fired and hit the doe.”

“With fire assured and meat again, our spirit rose a bit. Len cooked the meat on a spit over the open fire when we stopped for supper. We had no salt and the venison was fresh, but we at the meat. It was thirty-one years before I could stand to eat venison again.”

“The next day began where the previous one had ended, in very hard going that included two portages. Before noon Stan had made what seemed the perfectly reasonable suggestion that we give up the entire nonsense, scale the canyon walls, and take our chances at the top. There were no obviously compelling arguments to be made against the proposal, but we agreed to go on until lunch.

Just before noon, I noticed that the canyon ahead changed to a V shape. It had been perpendicular since Kitty’s Hot Hole. The V-shape meant at least an easier climb out compared with scaling the vertical walls that had surrounded us for days.

At noon we snagged the outer cover on the raft, miraculously only for the first time. We had saved the patching and glue from the wreck, so we hauled up onto the shore, patched the raft and had lunch: more venison, but there was, as I recall, one last can of soup. Shortly after we took of again, the canyon widened and we saw in the far distance what appeared to be a grade up the side of it. This would be the third point of entry and exit from the Bruneau. We now pushed on with high spirits.

The next sensation I can recall were the river deepening, then the canyon ending abruptly, and us floating in what seemed to be someone’s wheat field. I suddenly felt silly. We were in the middle of someone’s farm. We came quickly to a flood gate, the end of the Bruneau’s wild course. There, up over the bank, were a farmhouse, some chickens, and a woman staring at us in speechless, wide-eyed disbelief.”

“At Bruneau we found the usual combined gasoline pump, grocery store- bar, a few tourist cabins, and a small warm-water swimming pool.”

“We went inside. Stan bought a bottle of beer and a package of cigarettes. He put a nickel in the jukebox, selected some hillbilly tune, smoked a cigarette, and drank his beer, saying absolutely nothing until the ritual was complete. We had done it – we were the first whites ever to travel all the way through the Bruneau Canyon by boat.”

“Len’s story was published in Field and Stream with the black-and-white photos as per agreement, in the February, 1951, issue. I saw him again three years later in New York City, where he pursued a career editing outdoor magazines. Stan eventually published a novel. Others have since gone down the Bruneau in rubber kayaks, and at least one life has been lost. That did not surprise me when I heard it. Whenever someone in Idaho asked me in later years about ‘going down the Bruneau’ I would tell them to try the Middle Fork of the Salmon and save wear and tear.”