Red Canoe - Milner Canyon, Idaho

We reached the dam at sunrise and found the river siphoned away by three large irrigation canals. Above the Milner Dam, the Snake River rolled at more than 8,000 cubic feet per second. Below, the flow was only 230 cfs. The river, America’s 10th longest, was suddenly so narrow you could nearly hop across it. it was as if the empire state building had been reduced to four stories, or King Lear truncated to one act.

Even the power station had shut down. In a drought year the farmers were squeez- ing every drop out of the river to irrigate the desert. Plant operator Stan Bell took us on a tour of the maze of tubes and massive steel turbines inside the concrete bunker a mile below the dam, at the bottom of a cascade of twisting rock for- mations called the “Milner Mile.” When the Mile is flowing—once every few years—it’s one of the most hell-roaring whitewater runs in the West. At 230 cfs it’s a series of shallow waterfalls. We planned to run the eight-mile Class III stretch that’s normally fed by the power plant, but Bell nonetheless tried to warn us off. “At this water level, boy, I wouldn’t suggest it,” he said. “Not at this level.”

Photographer David Stubbs and I had come to south-central Idaho to paddle Red Canoe on the sixth leg of its odyssey down the Snake River. Our mission: put in below the infamous Milner Dam to get a look at a river de-watered. The previous night, we had camped on the edge of a farm where the Snake was being spit across fields of potatoes, beans, and sugar beets in an inexorable tit-tit-tit of sprinklers.

Despite Bell’s warning, we were eager to explore down- stream. Peering over the edge of the basalt gorge some two hundred feet deep, it seemed an oasis paradise. We could see dark shapes slithering in the bright green river. “Salmon?” David asked, eyes wide. “Maybe steelhead,” I replied.

Putting in, we now saw they were carp, three feet long and slurping at the foam on the surface. Our shuttle driver, Jenny, would later tell us that her husband and his friends shoot them with bows for target practice.

As we paddled downstream, the canyon quickly deep- ened, but we hadn’t gone 50 yards when we encountered our first portage—a pile of rocks 10 feet high that under normal flows was allegedly a Class III riffle. We shoved the canoe atop the rocks, then handed it down the other side. Repeat.

The river offered little relief from the 90-degree heat. Pol- luted by agricultural runoff and thick with suspended particles of algae, I never considered a cooling dip. A bathrub ring coated the exposed rocks. It was like being at the bottom of a drained fish tank.

Twelve portages later, as darkness set in, we ditched the canoe. We were low on water, and didn’t have enough warm gear to bivoac. We spied an opening in the cliffs where a small draw emptied into the river, and decided to hike out. On top of the rim we followed, what else, an irrigation ditch toward the lights of a farmhouse, dry bags slung over our shoulders like hobos. The owners were an ancient couple who eyed us sus- piciously. They pointed us toward the takeout at Caldron Linn, about a mile away, and gave us water, but did not offer a ride.

The next morning we hiked upstream and finished the run. It turned out the portage where we abandoned Red the night be- fore would have been our last, and we could have made the rest of the flatwater paddle in the gathering dusk. Our one solace that morning was a gushing spring on the side of the canyon, one of thousands that pour out of cracks in the volcanic rock and help restore the abused river. One look at each other was all it took for us to turn the canoe around and paddle over to the bank. We stood under the gushing waterfall in the cool, clear water, the pains and tribulations of the previous day washed away into the river.