Finding My Way

Draft 4.0
April 1, 2026   FINIS (I say finis, but I should know better)

 

When people ask if I’m an Idaho native, I tell them, “No, I came to this state with my pants on.”

What I think they're asking, politely, is this: How did someone like you end up hosting and guiding Outdoor Idaho, the Intermountain West’s longest-running and most decorated outdoor television program? And how does a show like that last four decades?

I ask myself the same thing. So where to begin?

In 1960, wedged into the far back seat of a green American-made station wagon, clutching a small duck I’d won at a school fair, I arrived in Boise from Minot, North Dakota, with my mom and dad and two brothers. My dad’s job in finance meant a promotion out West, and I decided to tag along.

I was ten years old and fresh off a fifth-grade geography test in which my only mistake was misspelling Idaho’s state capital. Some might have taken that as an omen. At the time, it felt more humiliating than moving to a state where I knew no one.

Like so many who have since poured into Idaho—duck aside—I knew almost nothing about the place. And what I thought I knew was wrong. Idaho was not the “Tick Fever State,” bumper stickers notwithstanding. Its ragged border with Montana was not the result of drunken surveyors. And “Idaho” is not an Indian word meaning “Gem of the Mountains.”

What cemented me here was what has hooked so many others: the Sawtooth Mountains.

I still remember rounding the bend on Highway 21 near Stanley and seeing those jagged peaks for the first time. My world expanded instantly. I swallowed that hook deep. There would be no catch and release for me.

The City of Boise sponsored a 50-mile youth hike into the Sawtooths with pack horses, adult leaders, and a dozen boys I didn’t know. After that initiation, later trips with high-school friends to Alice and Imogene, Toxaway and Edith lakes severed whatever thin thread still tied me to North Dakota.

Growing up Catholic, I studied the Bible. But, truth be told, I was captivated by another bible almost as much: Mountain Lakes of Idaho, a modest 20-page Idaho Fish and Game pamphlet cataloging lakes across the state, complete with trails and blunt fishing forecasts: “excellent,” “good,” “poor.”

I still have that dog-eared 1965 copy. When I open it, I can almost feel the weight of a canvas pack on my shoulders.

My parents would drop us off somewhere along that intimidating sweep of granite peaks and agree to meet us days later. With oatmeal, rice, dried fruit, chocolate bars—and always butter and salt for the trout we expected to catch—we headed into what felt like the Promised Land.

It took me years before I saw Idaho as more than a series of lakes and mountain ranges, with the Sawtooths the fairest of them all. Deserts and canyons would just have to wait until I was ready.

 

Part of the Sawtooth range then carried an even more romantic name: the Idaho Primitive Area. No roads. No motors. No permanent buildings. Just lakes, trails, and possibility. A decade later it would become the Sawtooth Wilderness, centerpiece of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. But to us it was already sacred ground.

We fished hard and confidently. Our secret weapon was a small container of worms, sure to impress the large fish our bible promised us. I suspect the prophet Isaiah might have approved of our slavish devotion to God’s creation, if not our methods.

Years later my high school friend Larry Reilly, who traveled from Portland to join several of those trips, summed it up this way: “Those mountains are majestic and scary and safe, all at the same time. They were a big part of our growing up. Idaho is lucky to have them.”

He was right. They raised us. I wince now at some of our behavior: the trout we caught and wasted, the careless campfires, the casual rearranging of rocks and shorelines as if the mountains were ours to edit. We were teenagers and often the only ones at those lakes, which felt like permission.

Near Toxaway Lake we once encountered a grizzled old miner who delighted in bad-mouthing the U.S. Forest Service. We doubted his expertise; every ranger we’d met had been helpful and patient, even if Lassie was nowhere in sight.

The miner lent us twine to build a crude raft for a trip to Toxaway’s island, where we carved our initials in trees we had no business marking. He also assisted, indirectly, in one of our more questionable ideas.

We devised an elaborate midnight prank on a friend hiking up to meet us: jeans stuffed with grass to resemble a body, rope over a branch, carefully timed sound effects. In our minds it was brilliant theater. The body would swing across the trail at the exact moment, brushing the face of the hapless hiker. We tried to imagine the scream of terror that would ensue. It was after midnight when we decided Brad would not be coming. The ghostly presence of the dead man hanging by a rope was even frightening us, in the light of the full moon.

The next morning, we had all but forgotten the previous night’s silliness. We were too busy trying to fix a meal that didn’t include tiny brook trout. It was then we noticed an official-looking man on horseback riding into camp. He asked us if we knew anything about an alarming apparition along the trail. We played dumb, which of course, was not hard. After taking a good long look at each of us, the man and his horse proceeded up the trail to the next lake basin. We couldn’t tell if that snort we heard came from him or his horse.

Later, our friend arrived pale and shaken; he had spent the night in his car by Petit Lake.  We lasted perhaps ten minutes before confessing. He said he was walking up the trail with his head down, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that almost caused him to die of fright. Teenagers can be so emotional. Eventually he forgave us. Teenagers can be reckless and loyal in equal measure, especially after we fed him breakfast.

That same afternoon we climbed the tallest peak above the lake. There were moments when each of us needed a hand from the others. Nothing builds humility faster than exposure and thin air.

From the 10,000-foot summit we counted more than 20 lakes and one ribbon of highway. I could trace the route of the 50-mile hike from a year earlier. For the first time, the Sawtooths made sense as a system rather than a scatter of destinations.

I also learned a lesson mountaineers repeat to novices: climbing up is optional; climbing down is mandatory—and usually a lot harder.

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If the mountains were shaping my heart, another path was shaping my discipline.

I attended high school at Mt. Angel Seminary in Oregon, intending to become a Catholic priest. A Benedictine nun at Sacred Heart School in Boise had convinced me I had what she called a “vocation.” Within two years I was living on a hilltop among monks, where everyone, including me, dressed in long black robes.

Life at Mt. Angel ran on bells. Here’s a typical day at Mt. Angel Seminary:
6:05 a.m. The first wake-up bell.
6:10 a.m. A second wake-up bell for the stragglers who missed the first one.
6:30 a.m. Study hall in our classrooms on the floor beneath our dorms.
7:01 A walk to morning Mass in the monastery crypt, officiated by one of the Benedictine monks.
7:45 A walk to breakfast, in another building. Once inside and seated at tables, we finally could break the silence.

The breakfasts were cooked by a bevy of Benedictine nuns. Pancakes were the favorite: a rubbery texture that the Pancake House could never duplicate. We each took turns being waiters for our classmates. The stint was for a week at a time. A good waiter was the one who could bring back stacks of pancakes and extra Rice Chex for the six students sitting around the table that each waiter was serving.

The first time we had “free time” was at 8:30 a.m. Then Algebra class at 9:00 a.m.
Our classes continued until noon, with more free time after lunch. Classes commenced at 1:00 p.m. until sports at 4:00 p.m.

Sports for us took place on a large grass field below the monastery. Everyone was expected to play the sport of the day: soccer one day, then tag football. The high school had a full-sized basketball court that also served as a meeting place for special events, which usually meant speeches from dignitaries. Occasionally, our Mt. Angel Saints would play a local team in basketball. It was a fool-proof way to re-learn the virtue of humility.

There was more free time after dinner, then study hall from 7:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m.  A bit more free time, then bedtime at 10:00 p.m. in one of several large dormitories. No Johnny Carson for us. There was no worry about falling out of bed. The shape of the mattresses resembled tiny bathtubs. Still, we slept the sleep of the blessed.

Things weren’t always so strict, however. Sometimes on the weekend, we’d have what were called Days of Recollection. It was a time to meditate about the Good Book and the persecution of the early Church saints and how Hell was a place to avoid at all costs. We all assumed Purgatory was in our future, but at least there was hope for the good life once we had washed away our transgressions.

That’s a lot for a high-school boy to think about, especially in a school where no girls were present.

Each year a full-week retreat broke up the monotony. Some of us never quite knew what to make of the retreats. It always meant prayers upon prayers but sometimes we’d get a fire and brimstone speech from some dignitary from Portland, Oregon.

My friend Larry and I were planning a return to the Sawtooths recently, when he reminded me why he had left the seminary after only two years. I had assumed he just didn’t have what it takes, but, no, it was one of those dramatic fire and brimstone lectures that sent him over the edge. It one on the evils of mast*urbation, delivered by a young priest from Portland. “I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about,” said Larry, “but I left not soon after that.”

And here I would have bet money that it was his inability to wrap his head around God as the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

 

 So, structure was much more than a recommendation through high school. It was a way of life. My freshman class numbered sixty-five. It was the largest class ever, during the optimistic era of Pope John XXIII, when change in the Church felt imminent. However, by senior year, only twenty-five remained. Many left in the middle of the night. Vocations, it turned out, were easier to declare than to sustain.

The academics were rigorous and classical. English became my refuge. Thanks to Father Ignatius, I could diagram a sentence in my sleep. Speech and Debate were mainstays for a small group of us. Our tiny forensics team punched above its weight limit, toppling the Goliaths around the northwest in oratory, extemporaneous speaking, and debate. We occasionally would hear comments from other students, that it was unfair they had to compete against students whose lives consisted of study hall.

In my senior year I actually won the Oregon state championship in After-Dinner-Speaking. My speech consisted of making fun of seminary life, with satire and irony. The audience seemed to enjoy the 10-minute memorized speech, even though I thought they often laughed in the wrong places.

 

After college, I interned in Washington, D.C., for Republican congressman John Dellenback of Oregon. The poor man’s district included the towns of Eugene and Medford, Oregon. That’s like trying to satisfy voters in Sun Valley and Challis. I figure the University of Oregon’s political science department must have chosen me because they didn’t like the congressman. They wanted to make his life even more difficult.

Washington felt foreign to me: humid, monumental, humming with ambition. I toured museums, ate exotic sandwiches, and navigated the Capitol’s hidden tunnels. It took exactly two days of summer humidity for me to devise a foolproof way to shut down the federal government: sabotage the air conditioning. By noon, surrender would be guaranteed.

But it wasn’t politics that called to me. It was the mountains.

On my way to visit my older brother near the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, I camped in a tent for a few weeks outside Idaho City, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Town That Refused to Die,” forty miles north of Boise.

The day I planned to leave, I wandered into O’Leary’s Saloon. The bartender mentioned he was heading back to architecture school and that Pat O’Leary would soon need a replacement. He introduced me to Pat, we shook hands, and I was hired. Pat assured me I’d pick up the skills along the way. But it didn’t happen soon enough.

A “ditch”—bourbon and water—was the standard drink among locals. Wanting to elevate the experience for the City Marshal, I ran a lemon slice around the rim of his glass and dropped in a bright red cherry.

A man named Jerry Lansing was sitting next to him on a bar stool. He stared at me and said flatly, “Reichert, you’re not going to last two weeks here.”

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My soon-to-be friend Jerry Lansing may have been right about most things, but he was wrong about that. I lasted more than two weeks. In truth, I never really left.

 

What I didn’t realize then was that Idaho City—like the Sawtooths, like Mt. Angel—was another apprenticeship. Nothing official, but the town was my classroom. I had wanted something different from what I had ever experienced, and I got it.

And there were lessons I was learning: how to listen more, how to measure a person by his handshake, how to shape a story so that others could see themselves in it.

Those lessons didn’t feel momentous. They felt more like survival. But a few years later, those small lessons would matter. They would help me feel at home in another new environment, being in front of a camera, trying to describe why this state—and the people in it—meant something to viewers and me.  

They would help with the improbable task of putting into words the grandeur and grit of Idaho, the weathered faces, the hard-scrabble landscape, the fierce loyalties. I had come to Idaho City thinking I was passing through. Instead, it was shaping the person and voice I would one day carry throughout the state.

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