Possible photos... ideally, the photos would be taken from the aerial footage: Snake river, Shoshone falls, Sawtooths, Palouse, Priest Lake, a photo of the helicopter with crew. If things go south, this chapter will likely be pulled.

 

Aerial Tapestry     

 

To distill the essence of Idaho in the span of an hour and do it completely from the air—it seemed like an audacious gamble, bordering on folly in 1999. We wondered if our audience would appreciate a program with no people in it.  The audience reaction was quick and emphatic. Judging by the flood of comments, donations, and DVD sales, Idaho Public Television’s special production, Idaho: An Aerial Tapestry became an instant success story. In sixty minutes, viewers saw more Idaho than many manage in a lifetime of travel.

Some of us jokingly called it Aerial Tapioca, a wink at my occasionally overcooked prose paired with soaring images captured from a camera bolted to the belly of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The combination worked beyond our wildest dreams. A quarter-century later, I still think of Aerial Tapestry as my love letter, written by a young man too smitten to blush at his flowery language or to acknowledge his beloved’s imperfections. “For those intent upon understanding this region,” I narrated, “a note of caution. Beware of sudden geographical mood swings.”

Even now, if I were teaching an Idaho geography course to fourth graders, that hour of visual wonders from high above would serve as a worthy starting point. The producer, director, chief videographer, and editor of the project was my colleague John Crancer. Ricardo Ochoa assisted on camera, along with David Walsh of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The original score came from two northern Idaho musicians performing as Wild Roses. My job was to write the text and be the narrator as well as executive producer.

                       

The promotional copy promised “an aerial celebration of mountains, rivers, deserts and lakes” and “a bird’s-eye tour of the state’s natural beauty and geological extremes.” John said, “It was an ambitious undertaking. We needed a near-perfect alignment of moving parts: the helicopter schedule, crew availability, rented equipment. And the one factor we couldn’t control, the weather. What we wanted was no rain and little wind. If we were lucky, everything lined up during the golden hours of sunrise and sunset. When that happened, the results were magical.”

John and the pilots mapped out a sweeping route east to west, south and north to the Canadian border.

During this process we gained deep respect for our pilots, our collaborators in the sky. We would suggest a target, they charted the line, and we maneuvered the tilt of the camera. Together. They found the angles that made Idaho sing.

For Aerial Tapestry there was an Outdoor Idaho crew of two plus the pilot. One crew member, usually John, was up front directing the pilot and running the tilt of the camera stabilizer, known as the Tyler Mount, which was attached to the bottom of the chopper. The second crew member sat in the back seat handling the important exposure of the camera and making sure it was actually recording the footage.

The plan was to keep the focus on the landscape and to keep people out of the storyline. For the most part, the program succeeded in doing just that. Sometimes shots of people could be a plus, however, when they added scale: a hiker on the Bruneau Sand Dunes, a rafter on the Middle Fork Salmon River, or a tractor plowing a field on the Palouse.

“We recorded some of our best footage flying just above the mountain tops,” said John. “In the Lost River Range that meant flying at 12,900 feet, barely skimming over Mt. Borah. The other elevation we loved was at river level, gliding just above the Salmon, the Snake, and the St. Joe rivers.”

We followed the arc of the Snake River, starting at the Wyoming border and tracing its westward journey across the state. The helicopter circled and lingered over certain geological landmarks. “Taller than Niagara,” I narrated about Shoshone Falls. “This spectacle is the signature work of the 15,000-year-old Bonneville Flood, whose waters drained Utah with such force that massive whirlpools tore blocks from the bedrock.”

Central Idaho’s batholith and wilderness areas received a great deal of attention, always with one eye on the gas gauge. Picture all that granite, with a red sunset lighting up the mountains. It’s a gem of wilderness geology. “Mountains as jagged and crumpled and pleated as the Snake River plain is flat.”

Farther north, over some of my favorite terrain, we paused above the Palouse, near the town of Moscow. “It feels comfortable, like home,” I narrated. “The lush curvature of the landscape tells you that life is easier here. These undulating hills, randomly arranged and brilliant in their diversity of colors, are in effect a sea of wind dunes, blown in by strong southwesterly currents. The green lawn, pelouse in French, stretches and swells and flows.”

The last leg of the 3,000-mile journey allowed us to explore the Clearwater drainage. We flew past the gold discovery of 1860 that shook the region like an earthquake, above the salmon-fishing grounds of the Nez Perce that Lewis and Clark would recognize even today, and around the 20-mile circle known as Silver Valley that produced more valuable metals than almost anywhere else in the world. Then we headed even further north into Big Lakes country. “Northern Idaho is land overrun by floods,” I narrated, “flooded first with lava flows, then with ice flows from the north. A warmer climate chased away the glaciers, but tell-tale signs remain, glacial deposits, natural levees for beautiful lakes.”

While producing the program, we deepened our understanding of the cataclysmic floods that shaped the region. Not just the outburst that sculpted the Snake River Canyon and Shoshone Falls, but the even larger Ice Age floods that repeatedly roared across northern Idaho, gouging out Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s largest and deepest lake.

As I noted in my narration, “ancient ice flows trapped and then released a flood of biblical proportions through the mouth of the Clark Fork River, among the greatest floods documented by man. And not just one. Geologists tell us the floods poured across the state and into the Washington scablands perhaps a dozen times or more as the ice jam froze and thawed and froze and thawed again.”

I’ve been told that our many hour-long programs featuring the entire state eventually got a little out of hand. Perhaps we had become prisoners of our own success, with hour-long Specials like Idaho’s Scenic Splendor; Idaho Edens; Imagine Idaho; State of Wonder; Idaho Rhapsody; Idaho, A Portrait. For many of these programs, that helicopter footage played a major role.

Idaho Edens, for example, returned people to the landscape. We spent 55 days in the field, logged 5,000 road miles, and shot 4,000 minutes of tape, all to craft a single hour. We also revisited 3,000 miles of helicopter footage we had sitting on the shelf. 

Aerial productions, however, do not come cheap. Aerial Tapestry cost more than $100,000, with helicopter rental, pilot fees, and fuel consuming most of the budget. The Tyler mount, a specialized stabilization system, fastened to the bottom of the helicopter. It was shipped from Colorado and needed to be reserved weeks in advance. The fee was $600 per day. It didn’t matter if the wind kicked up, smoke drifted in, or clouds hid the view. One of the things we hadn’t counted on was high-flying insects. More than once the pilot had to touch down so we could clean the camera lens. “In the Selkirk Mountains near Chimney Rock and the Canadian border, a pilot once balanced one skid on a rock ledge because there wasn’t a flat spot in sight,” recalled producer Jeff Tucker. “I jumped out, and Earl our pilot steadied the ship. I took care of the offending bug, and we were good to go.”

More than once we wondered if we’d gotten ahead of our skis. The tyranny of budget and Idaho’s size—seven degrees of latitude—meant there were corners of Idaho we never reached.

General manager Peter Morrill recalled Aerial Tapestry as “a groundbreaking, beautiful program that our viewers responded to in a positive way. That sustained the agency financially during a difficult period, as we dared to attempt what many PBS stations avoided for fear of financial risk. Across the country, public television stations were struggling. However, in Idaho our local productions made us, per capita, the most-watched PBS station in America. Programs like Aerial Tapestry and Idaho Edens led the charge.”

Of course, not every moment in a helicopter is fun. For our 13-part history series “Proceeding on—A Television History of Idaho,” Jeff Tucker asked the pilot to circle a granite spire in the Sawtooths. “That’s when Peter Morrill demonstrated what he’d had for breakfast,” laughed Jeff. “The pilot promptly returned him to Stanley so we could resume filming. Peter still complains about being left behind without his jacket.”

Everyone who took turns shooting from a helicopter had a story to tell. “I remember when you and I hired a helicopter to shoot the first aerial video of Hells Canyon with a Tyler Mount,” recalls Sauni Symonds. “It was exciting swooping over and around the cliffs and zooming over the river, just feet above the water. At one point, there appeared to be a malfunction with the helicopter, and we had to land quickly. There aren’t a lot of flat places in that canyon. Everything checked out ok, and up we went again.” 

Outdoor Idaho was a co-production with Fish and Game. “I sometimes had to hang out of the open door with my camera,” recalled Sauni, “secured only by a harness, while the pilot chased bighorn sheep across the desert. I found that very exciting but was glad when we began using a Tyler Mount!”  

For the most part, the pilots seemed to be having as much fun as our production team, but there was that time we got a stern lecture from one of the pilots. “Don’t leave anything behind,” he barked. “The last guy in my ship left a roast-beef sandwich under the back seat. It took me a week to figure out where the smell was coming from.” Of course, everyone on the camera crew knew immediately who the culprit was, didn’t we, John?

Years later, drones offered a more affordable alternative to renting helicopters, though the early drones lacked the ability to cross mountain ranges. When we needed a sweeping panorama in a hurry, we sometimes turned to a friendly pilot and his Cessna with a small camera mounted under the wing. I’m pretty sure no one checked in with the Federal Aviation Administration beforehand.

You’d think a 3,000-mile flight over several weeks would leave one favoring a certain part of the state, but Idaho is too complicated, confounding, and resistant to summary. No single vantage point, not even from a Bell Jet Ranger two miles above the earth, can fully capture this remarkable state. Yet that has never stopped us from trying.

To hear the man who spent the most time in the helicopter tell it, “I do have an affinity for the opposite ends of the state,” said John Crancer. “The large, lush lakes up north and the dramatic desert canyons in the south, you can’t get two more dramatically different landscapes. Priest Lake is particularly stunning. Surrounded by the Selkirk Mountains, Priest is a star among stars, especially Upper Priest Lake, rescued from development by Idaho Senator Frank Church.”

Priest Lake was the end of our aerial journey over Idaho. “The jewel of Idaho’s far north country, Priest Lake, nestles among the outstretched fingers of the Selkirk Mountain range,” I narrated. “The delicate play of fading sunlight on water creates the illusion of a gentle, sleepy blue wonderland, teeming with the mystery of wildness and home to caribou and an occasional grizzly bear. 

“Beautiful, bewitching Idaho. Esto Perpetua. May you live forever.”