71sun valley magazine

Driftingthe

MiddleFork

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Anchored by a stern rope to an exposed pine root, the boat is aglow with Sapeli mahogany. TheAfrican hardwood is capturing the early morning light in swirls of gold, orange, walnut, and ebony.This will be the maiden voyage of the drift boat, which was shaped, sanded, and finished duringthe winter by master boat-builder Al Bukowsky and is now loaded with fishing rods, flies, waterbottles, and sunscreen. Over the next six days, we will encounter a hundred class two and classthree rapids in this striking, but vulnerable, wooden boat.

Bukowsky stands in the square stern, framed between forested hills and moving water. The out-fitter and owner of Solitude River Company freely admits that the Middle Fork’s white water offerslittle room for error. Most guides first learn to row in rubber rafts, but Al started in wooden driftboats—which, he says, compensate in buoyancy and maneuverability for whatever they might lackin structural strength. (Nonetheless, commercial outfitters who run wooden drift boats are almostas rare as the peregrine falcons that nest among the Middle Fork’s sheer cliffs.)

text & photography Andy Slough

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The first wooden boats to run the Middle Fork of theSalmon River date back to the summer of 1926, whenPayette businessman and photographer Henry Weidner,his son Wes, rancher Harold Mallet, and friend andprospector Roy Herrington launched two canoes intoBear Valley’s Marsh Creek. For the next three and halfmonths, they paddled downstream on a photographicexpedition that eventually reached Riggins, Idaho, asmall town on the banks of the Main Salmon.

Cort Conley and Johnny Carrey’s excellent book,The Middle Fork, A Guide, details the journey of leg-endary Utah River guide Bus Hatch and his brother-in-law, Royce “Cap” Mowrey, nine years later. Hearing thatriver guide Parley Galloway was doing time for aban-donment in the Uintah County Jail in Vernal, Utah,Hatch and Mowrey dropped by to pay a social visit.Galloway’s tales of running major western rivers capti-vated the two carpenters, who then borrowed the oldboatman’s plans to build a tough, bow-and-stern-deckedwooden dory. They launched their vessel on Utah’s

Ladore Canyon, and then the Green River, and finally the Grand Canyon before they felt confi-dent enough to challenge the Salmon’s legendary white water.

The Mowrey-Hatch expedition entered the Middle Fork above Dagger Falls in mid-July of1935. Mowrey would later equate those first miles to “running a wheelbarrow down a stairway.”By the time the expedition reached Dagger Falls four days later, the men were exhausted, the boatswere leaking from half a dozen holes due to exposed rocks, and the sealing tar was gone. Unableto navigate the falls, they enlisted the help of local cowboys, who hitched their horses to the dam-aged hulls and dragged them out of the river.

Undeterred, the Hatch party returned the following July to find that water levels were up. Theparty reached the confluence of the Main Salmon six days after launching two new boats—with bottoms reinforced by conveyor belts.

The first drift boat appeared on the Middle Fork in July of 1939, when McKenzie boat builderWoodie Hindman and his wife, Ruth, launched into Marsh Creek above Dagger Falls. Woodiewould later remember, “The holes between the rapids were not long enough to give a fellow time tospit on his hands before he was into another.”

When the Hindmans belayed their boat down Dagger Falls, neither knew what lay around thenext bend. In those early years, there were no river maps showing the location of major rapids orgiving instructions for running them. The Hindmans scouted each stretch and ran what wouldlater be named Pistol Creek, Velvet Falls, Tappan Falls, Haystack, Porcupine, and Redside—allwithout holing the boat, flipping, or stalling on a standing wave and sinking. And when Woodieand Ruth finally reached the Main Salmon, they described a river pumping with raw vitalitythrough the wild heart of the Northern Rockies.

The Middle Fork’s hundred-plus miles are a federally protected “wild and scenic” waterway.Surrounded by Idaho’s enormous Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the combination

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and catch-and-release. The best fishing occurs in the morning and evening,and though fisherman do turn fish behind the house-sized boulders that splitthe current, most rises occur at the head of deep holes or in eddies along thebank, where trout wait for insects to tumble into their feeding window.

In the first mile of the second day, Al rows Robert into the shadow ofa towering cliff that plummets down a smooth, variegated granite wall intothe clear water. If trout are living in the Middle Fork, they are living here.Cutthroats ranging from 12 to a rare 20-plus inches are easily seduced bylarge dry flies: #8 and #10 Irresistibles, Royal Wulffs, and Elk Hair Caddisthat imitate grasshoppers, golden stoneflies, and a variety of aquatic emerg-ers. On this June morning, with clouds scudding over the canyon, thetrout are picking pupa off the foam lines twisting across the dark pools.

While Al holds the drift boat in an eddy, Robert lays a foam-bodiedClub Sandwich on the foam line next to the cliff. He waits until a shadowrises up the dark face, and then raises his rod tip when the fly disappears.In the next instant, the hook finds purchase and the cut turns downstream.The line hisses through the water as the trout jumps, sounds, and jumpsagain. The 16-inch rainbow marked by a bright red slash along its jaw—agorgeous wild fish—finally tires and comes to the boat. Wetting my handto avoid infecting the trout with fatal human bacteria, I slip the fly fromits jaw and release it back into the river.

Bukowsky tells us that caddis provide the most prolific hatches. “Thereare times when the hatches look like dust clouds moving up the river,” hesays. During our third night, at Whitey Cox campground, caddis maketheir first appearance at five o’clock, growing in numbers until it appears

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of white water, pristine riverside campsites, Sheepeater pictographs, anddramatic vistas makes the Middle Fork one of the Northwest’s premierfloat trips.

On the river with Al Bukowski, we spend the first morning casting tocutthroats, running rapids, and photographing the river, cliffs, and tributary streams. As the sun crosses the canyon toward the western ridge,we make camp at Little Pine. While Al and his fellow guides set up theirkitchen and start the fire for Solitude’s “world-famous Middle Fork friedchicken,” my son, Robert, and I claim a tent and then start a climbthrough waist-high grass in the direction of a peak rising above the camp.Ten minutes later, we enter meadows billowing with yellow balsamroot,arnica, scarlet paintbrush, pink fireweed, and blue lupine.

Robert and I climb until the camp recedes to a semicircle of greentents clustered around a bright fire. I have no hope of keeping up withmy nineteen-year-old son and, as the rolling hills give way to scree slides,Robert leaves me behind. He is a hundred yards above me when he tellsme to turn back. “I’ll catch you on the way down,” he yells. He shouldknow that I wouldn’t leave him on the exposed face. I continue to climbuntil, exasperated by my obstinacy, he stops short of the peak and turnsdownhill toward the camp’s distant fire.

It still takes six days to float from Boundary Creek to the confluence ofthe Main Salmon. In that distance, fly fisherman cast to tens of thousands oftrout. When the hatch is on, forty fish a day is not uncommon. Bukowskytells us that the Middle Fork’s rating as a blue-ribbon trout fishery oweseverything to regulations enacted in the ’70s that stipulate barbless hooks

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as if a midsummer snowstorm is sweeping across the river. By the time this winged biomass finally fades, it is nine o’clock in the dusky evening, and the boats are blanketed with spent insects.

Trout also feed upon the orange stoneflies that appear from late June to mid-July, and the golden stones that emerge for three weeks in July. The last of the big three tempters are the hop-pers, which commence around the third week in July and continue through mid-October. Thereare small, sporadic mayfly hatches throughout the season.

Searching the fly box that lies open on the brilliant forward deck for a Jack Cabe (a fly so deadly it can’t be photographed, compared, or described in print), I’m struck by Bukowsky’s skillas a boat builder.

Al tells me he was forced into action when KeithSteele died. “Keith was a cabinetmaker who built beau-tiful McKenzie boats,” he recalls. “When he died, any-thing comparable [to his boats] cost a fortune.”Bukowsky’s first effort was a kit boat, which he admitswas serviceable but rough.

“Around the same time,” he remembers, “Jerry Briggsand his dad, ‘Squeak,’ who built Martin Litton’s GrandCanyon dories, were closing down their boat works.” Albought their Briggs patterns and remaining materials and,with the aid of clamps, epoxies, brass screws and resins,shaped fir ribs and wrapped them with sheets of quarter-inch A/B plywood.

It has taken a decade for Bukowsky to refine his pat-tern. The marine grade plywood has been replaced withSapeli mahogany, the vertical grain fir ribs with PortOrford cedar. His boats now almost appear to be partouzel, the Middle Fork dipper that flourishes amongthe river’s wildest rapids. He can’t put an exact figureon how long it takes him to build one. “If all the pieceswere cut out and I could stick with it six hours a daywithout interruptions from the phone or people drop-ping by,” he estimates, “from start to finish, it wouldprobably take a month.”

On average, Bukowsky builds two boats a winter.The task keeps him busy while he waits for the moun-tains above the Middle Fork to charge with summer flows. During January and February, he formsthe ribs, bow deck, seats, and plywood floor.

Any guide who has feathered a drift boat around rocks or scraped over a basalt ledge knows thatwood is neither durable nor forgiving. It’s just a question of time—this trip, one later this summeror next season, until a rock punches through the plywood or the boat stalls on a wave and, inBukowsky’s words, “fills with water so quickly, one second you’re high and dry, and the next you’refighting for shore.” He is deadly serious when he says, “The Middle Fork’s cold water will take thefight out of you.” continued on page 154

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