Powerhouse
August 29, 2026
Draft 2.4

Rivers define Idaho. They shape the state’s landscape, its economy, and even its social life. Spend a week on an Idaho river, outfitters say, and people begin to act differently. They’re less stressed, more joyful, more open to decisions that might have seemed impossible back home. Big decisions like changing jobs, repairing or ending a relationship, moving to a new state, getting a dog. But on my first whitewater trip, I just wanted to live through the experience. I honestly thought I was going to die.

It was early June of 1984, and my buddy Jim Acee and I had never been on a Class IV river in a large inflatable raft before. But who could resist seven days on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, deep in the largest contiguous forested wilderness in the Lower 48? When our mutual friend Steve Stuebner invited us to join him and a few others on what magazines had called “the best river trip in the world,” how could we refuse? 

The trip had nothing to do with Outdoor Idaho, so there were no TV cameras along. But looking back now, that week shaped the series in ways no carefully planned production meeting or edict from management ever could.

We launched our 100-mile adventure as passengers during high water, under a mix of wind, rain, hail, and snow. Years later, when Jim and I reminisced about the trip, we compared notes and were surprised at how closely our fears had matched. For the first three days, my thought every morning was that I would probably perish. The cold waves crashing over the raft weren’t getting any smaller, and the water wasn’t getting any warmer. And we were poorly prepared for cold-weather boating. We wore tennis shoes instead of neoprene booties, cotton underclothes instead of wool or fleece, and flimsy raincoats instead of splash jackets or wetsuits. 

Jim later confessed that he thought he was going to die, too, and fulfill his mother’s worst nightmare. She had a recurring dream that he would drown, so she rarely let him near water. As a result, he never learned to swim well. Not ideal on a river trip.

On the afternoon of the third day, the sun finally came out. The temperature shot up. Canyon wrens singing, steaks on the grill, and happy hour in full force. Just maybe we would survive long enough to start enjoying the trip. But even with blue skies overhead, the thought of larger rapids downstream clouded our mood.

I’m sure there are still fingernail marks in the wooden seat of Steve’s boat. When we hit the huge waves of Rubber Rapid, every instinct in my body screamed “You do not want to swim here!” What surprised me most, I admitted later, was how quickly I slipped into the same fatalistic mindset I’d adopted years earlier in Guatemala, when I ran out of money and still had to figure out how to get back to Idaho. “The Lord will provide,” I had told myself then. Oddly enough, it helped.

Jim was not impressed with my philosophy. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he laughed. “That’s how people die.”

 

Apparently, what doesn’t kill you just postpones the inevitable. Not long after that June trip, Jim bought a raft. I bought one too, with friend Greg Harley. We named our boat the Rei-ley, a combination of Reichert and Harley. The adrenaline of that first whitewater experience propelled Jim and me into other river adventures: the Colorado through the Grand Canyon; the Rogue, Owyhee, and John Day in Oregon; the Green and San Juan in Utah; and the Yampa headwaters in Colorado.

Those trips opened new possibilities for storytelling as Outdoor Idaho began exploring the Selway, Salmon, and Snake and the desert rivers of southern Idaho. Whenever rafting was involved, Jim was usually the one we turned to. He wasn’t a professional Idaho outfitter, which meant we couldn’t pay him for his services. Of course, I never complained. That just meant more dollars for videotape, gas, and the occasional cheap motel. That’s how we rolled. 

For nearly four decades, we relied on Jim’s training. He had honed his skills as an instructor with the National Outdoor Leadership School, a nonprofit outdoor-education program focused on leadership, safety, and environmental ethics. He got so good at his “job” that we started calling him A.R. Acee. “Anal retentive,” we’d joke. “Always ready,” he’d retort.

It wasn’t long after my first Middle Fork trip that viewers began seeing hour-long Outdoor Idaho programs such as “The Whitewater State,” “River of No Return,” and “Salmon River Lodges and Legacies,” along with a dozen others where rafting played a major role, like “A Middle Fork Journey.” I didn’t realize how many shows involved rafting until author and back-country pilot friend Richard Holm commented that every time he turned on Outdoor Idaho, we were floating down yet another river. I believe his words were that we had gone overboard.

That’s when it dawned on me that most of those programs were really about the value of public lands. In my mind, public lands, exceptional rivers, and whitewater rafting have become inseparable.

The Middle Fork has always been good to me, which may explain why I like it so much. I understand the risk of publicly praising something you love. It can get overrun. But the Forest Service has a tight clamp on daily numbers, and I wanted to show our audience why Idaho is such a grand and wonderful place, worthy of affection and respect.  Of all the rivers that flow through Idaho, the most spectacular multi-day river experience in Idaho, if not the United States, is the Middle Fork of the Salmon River.

One hundred seems to be the magic number on the Middle Fork: 100 floatable miles, 100 rapids, and on a good trip 100 catch-and-release cutthroat trout. The Forest Service strictly limits launches, assigns campsites, inspects fire pans and portable toilets, all to keep the river pristine.

Some of my happiest river trips have been on the Middle Fork, even though we never used an outfitter, which means I always put up my own tent. When I look back, it’s always these river trips I think of fondly, even when the joke’s on me.

One hot summer day, we set up chairs in the shade, far above the beach, leaving our boats baking in the sun. Good boating technique is to let some air out of the boat tubes when boats are directly in the sun. But that afternoon, making gin and tonics was our priority.

As we chilled in the shade, a shocking BOOM! disrupted the festivities. We all looked to the sky, expecting a plane breaking the sound barrier. Then a second BOOM! Glancing at the boats, we could see the front of the Rei-ley raft collapsing on the sandy beach. Both front tubes had exploded. Everyone jumped up and ran to the river. But not to the Rei-ley. They raced to their own boats to release air. Self-interest was the order of the day. 

Anal-retentive, always-ready Jim saved the day. He pulled out a sewing awl and stitching thread from his repair kit. The outer wrap of the Rei-ley had exploded, allowing the inner tube to expand without bursting. A simple but time-consuming stitching job commenced, with friend Robert Minch taking the lead. He also cinched 20 rafting straps of different colors around the tubes. The raft had the look of something a mad scientist might have created. For the remainder of the trip, our group referred to the poor Rei-ley as the Franken-Minch.

Outdoor Idaho trips were always different from outfitted trips. Whenever anyone without much river experience joined one of our trips, Jim laid down the rules. There were many, but four were close to commandments:

1.Thou shalt stay in the cheapest Bates-like motel this side of the Mississippi.

2.Thou shalt bring thine own tent and know how to put the thing up. This is not Hollywood. Everybody works.

3.Thou shalt remember that rafting is like the Barnum and Bailey circus: put up the tent, take down the tent, load the raft, unload the raft. Repeat daily. 

4. Above all, thou shalt stay in the boat. In a difficult rapid, hold on, get low, and don’t fall out. Rule number two is to remember rule number one.

 

I didn’t fully appreciate the bonds the Middle Fork could forge until my second trip, when I officiated at the wedding of Greg Harley and Jan Sutter.

I’d come to know Greg Harley when he was living in Idaho City. At one point, much to my delight, he suggested we buy a raft together. When a mutual friend drew one of the Middle Fork’s much-coveted permits, the Rei-Ley became one of several rafts ferrying a wedding party 88 miles downstream, to Impassable Canyon and to a place once inhabited by a hermit.

That final stretch of the 100-mile river is called “impassable” for good reason. Towering, near-vertical granite walls hem in the river, funneling it through high-consequence Class IV rapids that leave little room for error.

The canyon’s most famous resident was Earl Parrott, now known as the Hermit of Impassable Canyon. Before the Depression, Parrott had built a small shack of a cabin high on the rim of Impassable Canyon, where he lived nearly a thousand feet above the river. He kept a garden, hunted game, did some prospecting, and lived largely on his own terms. He constructed a series of homemade log ladders to allow him to go from his cabin to the river to prospect for gold. He was “the archetypal hermit, the genuine thing,” wrote historian Cort Conley in Idaho Loners, with “a garden that looked like an exhibit at a state fair.”

An impassable canyon and a solitary hermit might not seem obvious symbols of wedded bliss. But the wedding party’s destination was up Nugget Creek, to a hidden grotto a quarter mile from the Middle Fork, where a waterfall spills from the nearby cliffs. On a hot day, it’s a perfect refuge from the summer heat: green, cool, quiet. It’s also a wonderful place for a wedding. “I’d never been on the Middle Fork of the Salmon before,” explained Jan Sutter, the new bride. “I figured it was about time I remedied that oversight.”

The wedding marked my debut as a mail-order minister, thanks to Greg Harley, who arranged my ordination for a mere twenty-five dollars. The most distressing part of becoming a minister came later, when I delivered the signed marriage certificate to the clerk’s office in Idaho City. Just thinking of me as a minister caused hysterical laughter among some of the clerks.

Later requests for my services followed, including a courthouse wedding in Idaho City where the father of the bride carried a shotgun, supposedly in jest.

 

We’ve certainly aired the river fight enough times, in Outdoor Idaho promotions and in numerous shows:  two women battling against a river that wanted to roll their raft like a pop can. The current had pinned the 15-foot boat against a boulder in the Middle Fork’s Haystack Rapid, jamming one side high onto the rock, with the other side still trapped in the powerful current. The boat didn’t tip as much as stand nearly vertical, with the women holding on for dear life.

Then Ann Joslin and Susie Shannon did the one thing that saved them. They climbed upward. By bracing their feet on the sinking tube, they were doing the one thing that keeps a pinned boat from flipping, putting their weight exactly where the river least wants it.

Outdoor Idaho viewers who were watching the video for the first time had no idea what would happen next. Perhaps even the raft itself was trying to decide. Would the boat topple backward and crush the women beneath it, letting the river swallow boat and bodies and carry them downriver?

Or would the women outwit the raging river, forcing the raft to begrudgingly slide off the rock and back into the water? For a suspended moment, either option seemed possible. And then the river made a choice. Almost casually, the boat eased down the face of the granite boulder and rejoined the river, to the applause of fellow rafters preparing to pull the women to shore. They had outsmarted another Middle Fork rapid and were rightfully proud of their accomplishment.

What the TV audience did not see or hear during all this was me on shore, yelling to the videographer on the bluff “Keep rolling! Keep rolling!” All the while other boaters in our group were rushing downstream to rescue the women.

Television viewers might not have heard me, but the two women heard me, and soon I heard from them. They were not impressed with my priorities and didn’t take kindly to being reminded of the oft-used phrase when filming river trips: Bad Rafting Makes Great Television. I told the women they had just made great television.

Jim Acee understood, because the same thing happened to him in our 2007 autumn program “A Middle Fork Journey.” Jim had managed to get himself stuck in Class IV Tappan Falls, maybe 50 feet from shore. He had been “running sweep,” and by the time he arrived at the famous rapid, we already had the camera positioned to capture footage. Jim couldn’t have been pleased seeing us so close to him, as we gathered wide shots and close-ups for almost a minute, until he eventually, rather elegantly, freed himself from the hydraulic whirlpool that was holding his boat.

“I was outsmarted by the rapid,” confessed Jim back at camp. “I am a pretty good technical water rafter, and it's nice to be kept honest occasionally and screw up. That gives everyone else a chance to cheer because they like it when you screw up. Besides, bad rafting makes great television, especially with Outdoor Idaho, and that increases my chances of making it into the show, instead of winding up on the cutting room floor.”

 

The adage among river runners is that what happens on the river stays on the river. A corollary could be: Until five years later, when it becomes legend. Every outfitter has stories that have become legendary. Our little group also had a few.

Stories of people failing to tie their tent down at Hospital Bar, where it’s always windy, allowing a micro-burst to send the tent traveling two hundred yards in the air and ending up lost to the fast-moving river... forgetting to properly tie your raft up at night and having to chase it 6 miles downriver the next morning before coffee and breakfast, where it was waiting patiently in a cove... forgetting to latch the dry box, hitting a big rapid and turning the toilet paper into a wet mess... the woman who discovered a rattle snake in the make-shift bathroom we set up each late afternoon. She refused to use the toilet for the rest of the week-long trip.

We filmed our 2007 “A Middle Fork Journey” program during a low-water September trip when permits are easier to get. Hikers Kay Johnson and Norm Nelson decided to meet us at the Camas Creek campsite along the Middle Fork. For them it was an eight-mile descent over two days of fishing. For the rest of us, the rafting distance to Camas Creek camp was twenty-five miles, a two-day float.

“Norm Nelson and I couldn’t make the launch date,” said Kay Johnson, “so we decided to hike down Camas Creek trail and intercept them. On the first day we stepped aside to let a string of pack horses squeeze past us. You never know what starts a rockslide in that steep country, but half a mile further down the trail we found rocks covering the horses’ tracks. The slide had managed to miss the packtrain and miss us, too. The timing couldn’t have been better.  Our luck held all the way to the Middle Fork beach. We hit Camas Creek campsite, just as Bruce’s rafting group came into view. Couldn’t plan that if you tried.”

That afternoon, everyone sat for interviews, and Pat Metzler created the illusion of multiple locations in how he positioned the backdrop. Our program highlighted cultural resources, including ancient pictographs by the Tuka-Deka (Sheep Eater people). My research suggests that there is a huge several-thousand-year discrepancy about the age of this rock art. We also explored the effects of wildfires and added to the program rare film of early Middle Fork River runners in wooden boats and giant chinook salmon that used to populate the main tributary of the Salmon River.

 

Every river guide has a favorite Middle Fork rapid: Hell’s Half Mile, Haystack, House of Rocks. My personal favorite is Powerhouse, one of the longest rapids. Rafters either love it or fear it. Or both.

Part of Powerhouse is Class IV, so water conditions, even rock placement, can change with flow. But always expect big drops and technical lines.

Many guides break the half mile Powerhouse into three parts: upper, middle, and lower Powerhouse. The water is moving fast, and you must row with intention. Forget the chit-chat. You need laser focus. Certain moves need to occur at just the right moment.

A rock garden introduces you to the rapid, with fast water, seriously large boulders and big waves. The river then takes a right turn as you enter middle Powerhouse. It is often possible to pull off and appreciate the old wooden powerhouse structure. The river then takes a sharp left and tries to shove you into a rock cliff. Pull far away from it or hit it straight on with the front of the boat. Otherwise, you could easily flip. The third part of Powerhouse requires zigzagging through obstacles and keeping right of the wrap rock at the end.

Powerhouse is exhilarating. It’s kinda scary in a fun sort of way. There’s a route that will keep your passengers and your raft free of harm. You just have to find it and do it on the run.

 

Few people have rafted the Middle Fork more than retired outfitter Jerry Hughes. “There is probably no other river in Utah, Oregon, and Idaho that combines as many neat characteristics as the Middle Fork,” he marveled, when we asked him to explain the attraction. “It’s a wilderness area, so there are no motorized uses on the water. Ninety-five percent of the time the water is crystal clear. It’s a blue-ribbon trout fishery and a challenging boating trip loaded with backcountry history and natural hot springs. It’s an unbelievable combination of great characteristics and things to enjoy. I think about it every day. I dream about it, too. I just adore it.”

I understand exactly what Jerry means.

The Middle Fork has been good to me for more than thirty years. Of course wild rivers change, but there was a feeling of certainty about one of the original eight rivers designated in the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System.

The Forest Service published a pamphlet entitled “the MIDDLE FORK of the SALMON a wild and scenic river.” This prized possession described each rapid. I still have the 1985 edition and the 2000 edition. Velvet Falls is the first Class IV rapid that rafters will experience, 5.1 miles from the put-in at Boundary Creek launch.

Both editions, 15 years apart, describe how to run Velvet using the same words: look for a very large boulder on the left bank and a small creek entering the river on the right. “Stay to the left, right next to the boulder. This lane should take you into a narrow chute which will carry you through.”

If you followed that advice today, there would be serious consequences. Wildfires and heavy rains in 2022 and 2023 flushed tons of mud and boulders and trees into the river, completely altering the river’s hydrology, making Velvet a continuous staircase. The debris fan is still shifting with each high-water cycle. What used to be a tricky but standard run is now more technical and dangerous with debris and unstable conditions increasing the risk of snagging and getting caught in holes. Velvet rapid is not the only volatile rapid.

Thirty years ago, the rapids of the Middle Fork were legendary but relatively predictable. Today, they change almost every season.

The large hot wildfires, which lead to logjams, rockslides, and new rapids have changed the river I knew. Some favorite campsites no longer look the same. Some stretches of water now demand more caution than pleasure. There are times when I find myself thinking that my friends and I were lucky to experience the golden years of Middle Fork rafting, at least in our lifetimes.

I have to remind myself that rivers don’t pay much attention to human lifetimes. The Middle Fork has always been changing. Fires burn. Mountains slide. Trees fall. New rapids appear. Old ones disappear. The river rearranges itself and keeps moving.

For me, though, it is still the river that sets the standard. Other rivers may be bigger, wilder, warmer, or more dangerous. But the Middle Fork is the one I measure them against.

Maybe that's part of what I like about Powerhouse. The river is moving fast. The route changes. You pay attention, make your move, and find your way through.

Then you keep going, toward five more days of Class IV rapids.

                   -30-