A Slice of Paradise

“The best place I have found to glimpse the western land as it was in the last century...is in the Sawtooth-Stanley country in south-central Idaho.” (Harlan Hague)

Summer is a fantastic time to travel and explore, and to share images of beautiful places. These glimpses of the larger world keep our spirits alive through the whole year, so today I want to share a few more photographs from my recent travels.

In last week's newsletter, I described my trip to Utah's Uinta Mountains and how I got chased out by an incoming monsoon storm. When I left the Uintas, I headed to the Sawtooth Mountains in south-central Idaho, an area I'd heard good things about, but that had never been on my radar and about which I knew nothing at all.

My growing interest in Idaho first started during an earlier trip to north-central Idaho in May, when I explored the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and the Idaho Batholith, but I was still completely unprepared for what I would discover in south-central Idaho.

All of my life, my only image of Idaho has been the very long and dreary drive across the Snake River Plain. This time, however, I turned north from the endless feedlots and intensive agriculture along the interstate highway and found myself driving through an increasingly fascinating landscape.

By the time I reached Sun Valley in the narrowing Big Wood River valley, I was already having a hard time driving and not staring at the mountains around me. But nothing could have prepared me for the experience that lay ahead as I skirted the rugged Boulder Mountains, crossed Galena Summit, and entered Stanley Basin for the first time.

Here was a piece of paradise that I didn't know could exist in America. A stunning rural landscape, a tiny rustic town with 100 residents, jaw-dropping mountains, incredible geology, and lifetimes of wild trails to hike.

Still not knowing what this place was all about, I drove into town and discovered that "downtown" Stanley (two blocks of gravel streets) was closed for a street dance party. This place was hopping! Music every night (including big-name music acts), an art and crafts festival, great food, and sandhill cranes bugling in meadows across the street.

That was all great, but I needed a base camp so I could begin exploring this new landscape. After grabbing a campsite along the river near one of the many hot springs, I started sampling a tiny smidgen of what this region has to offer.

And when I say, "tiny smidgen," I'm not joking. Not even counting the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness on the north side of the Stanley Basin, there's the 750,000-acre Sawtooth National Recreation Area, plus multiple wilderness areas with an inconceivable number of trails and very wild places across four vast mountain ranges (Sawtooth, White Cloud, Boulder, and Pioneer).

I love big, wild places, but south-central Idaho is almost too big to wrap my mind around.

While the massive Idaho Batholith that I wrote about in May underlies much of this area, the geology of this region is far more complex than that. The Sawtooth Mountains, for example, are formed by the Sawtooth Batholith, a body of pink granite younger than the Idaho Batholith that erodes along vertical joints to create sheer cliffs and jagged peaks.

Many of the trails of this region climb into subalpine or alpine cirques with lush meadows and lakes surrounded by rugged peaks. It is said that there are 40 peaks over 10,000 feet and 300 mountain lakes around the Stanley Basin, and I don't doubt it!

Late July turned out to be an awesome time to be there because there were fields of wildflowers, butterflies, and pollinators, not to mention a constant bustle of singing birds, chipmunks, and squirrels.

I'm not writing today's newsletter to promote the Sawtooth Mountains, so I don't want to go on and on about my time there. I simply want to share a vision of hope and beauty, and keep that spirit alive in all of us. We are very lucky that places like this exist because we need them more than ever now!