The Road to Shoup

Ruminations on the ever-perilous river shuttle

The put-in for a six-day commercial river trip has all the nervous energy of a high school dance with none of the cute airplane bottles of vodka to ease the tension.

The guests—often hailing from big cities and somewhat insulated lives—are generally smart, leader-types: captains of industry, lawyers, doctors, well-heeled folks. But they are excited and painfully awkward in word and action: “Should I put on my sunscreen now?”; “Is there a real bathroom downriver?”; “Where are my children?”; “Does this lifejacket work?”; “Does beer float?” (Answers: yes; no; behind you; yes; and yes, but Cokes don’t.)

Once we’ve waded through this forest of uncertainty, everyone makes their way to the water and the boats, and we begin a two-minute paddling practice session in the eddy before the river sweeps us away for the week. This is when more profound questions arise: “Do people die on this river?”; “How long have you been doing this, exactly?”; “Where are my children?” (Answers: Nice ones don’t; too long, I now realize; behind you).

One day, as we paddled out of the eddy and onto the Middle Fork of the Salmon, a gentleman of 60, CEO of something or other, asked me: “Will we end up back here at the end?”

“You mean, in this eddy? Like a rollercoaster?”

(Answer: Hard no).

I then felt obligated to explain as delicately as possible a bit about gravity and rivers. My tutorial seemed to be well received. It did, however, make me rethink my answer to the “Do-people-die-on-this-river” question.

More to the point, it made me realize that there is an entire aspect of river trips that the guests really have absolutely no concept of: the river shuttle. In fact, the river shuttle encompasses just about everything that transpires off the river for an adventure like this, which is a tremendous amount.

A commercial river trip officially begins at a guide house: a dirty little place home to eight or so guides at any given time. Step one involves loading an unbearable amount of stuff onto a big, burly pickup and a commensurately big trailer. The “stuff” comprises five heavy boats, one giant sweep boat, paddles, oars, heavy pain-inflicting metal frames, wooden decks, lifejackets that work, helmets, pumps, safety gear, first-aid, chairs, tents, tables, sleeping bags, cots, portable toilets, tents for portable toilets, snacks, beers that float, sodas that don’t, coolers and dry boxes filled with food to feed 30 people for six days, pots and pans, utensils and plates to accompany food to feed 30 people for six days, fire pans, stoves, propane, water jugs, Dutch ovens, and approximately 5,000 other small items of unknown importance. It’s like one big floating favella.

Also stuffed into the pickup are six, sometimes seven guides, ages between 20 and 70, and their associated stuff. This conglomeration of people and gear then hurtles down the highway at great speed. “Highway” might be an overstatement. It generally alternates between a run-of-the-mill rural highway and a twisty little road with a sharp drop-off to a flowing river spitting distance away. And the last hour or so of any shuttle always seems to end with an even twistier, dirtier little road down a steep canyon. One very rainy and muddy drive to put in on the Tuolumne River down the notoriously steep Lumsden Road, we had to Ro-sham-bo to determine who got to ride down the canyon standing on the back bumper of the truck, the idea being that one could leap clear of the truck when it started sliding off the road into oblivion.

“But really, what could possibly go wrong on a river shuttle?”

As it turns out, just about everything. And it is why every outfitter in the world will tell you it’s the most terrifying part of an outfitting endeavor.

The list of what could actually go wrong is long and varied. Of course, the obvious can and does happen: flat tires, gear flying off the load, wild animals leaping into the road, gear being left behind at the house, guides being left behind at the house, rock chips, endless construction delays and detours, overheating engines, trailer hitches failing, and manual transmissions getting shredded by young guides with more experience driving Go-Karts at the Jolly Roger Speedworld than driving trucks and trailers.

There are, also, less obvious events that just rain down from the universe. To wit, we were once in a particularly tight and winding section along the river near Sunbeam, Idaho, steaming along with a fully loaded rig. I’ll make a rough estimate that our hurtling mass of stuff approached 12,000 pounds and was probably moving at 40 mph. That’s a lot of kinetic energy (870,221 Joules). As we rounded a corner, there in the road was an older gentleman nonchalantly driving a horse and buggy, plodding along with virtually no kinetic energy. Just so everyone is calibrated, it takes 1 Joule to lift one apple one meter. By the grace of God, and good brakes, and good braking skill on the part of the driver at the time (I think it was my buddy, JT) this particular apple cart was not upset. But it was pretty damn close to being the scene of carnage you might see in a lame action movie like “Amish Justice 2.”

The real rub with river shuttles, however, is usually at the end of the trip, on the way from the river back to the dirty little guide house. Why is this? The drive tends to be longer, and after six, 16-hour days on the river with 23 guests, guides are tired and somewhat cranky. And while it is taboo to say such things, there is usually alcohol thrown into the mix. Believe it or not, for almost all the years I was guiding with my friends on the Middle Fork and Main Salmon Rivers, it was actually legal for the passengers of a massive, train-like vehicle to be drinking on these rural Idaho county roads. Keep in mind, however, that in another stroke of legislative genius, the Idaho Legislature not too long ago also legalized firing squads.

JT, who was our sweep boat driver, used to oversee the loading of our rig at take out of the Middle Fork. Take outs were always hot and dusty and confusing, with a lot of heavy lifting added to the misery. All the gear we started with had to get back onto the truck and trailer, and it had to happen relatively quickly for reasons not worth going into here.

Once the guests got packed into their bus and drove away with their stuff, the guides could and did breathe a sigh of relief. That sigh of relief was often accompanied by the cracking open of a round of cold beers. It was then that JT would interject with his sage admonition, “Remember, we could still fuck this up.”

Different rivers have shuttles with differing degrees of pain and heartache. The Middle Fork has a relatively easy one—maybe three hours tops. The only hitch with that one was the stop at Spring Creek along the way.

Spring Creek sounds nice, right? Sadly, in the bad old days, Spring Creek was home to a giant metal tanker of some sort. A circular port hole was at the top of it, fairly high off the ground such that one had to climb a metal ladder to get to a little platform to access it. It was from here that we—two guides who lost at Ro-sham-bo (again, how justice is meted out in the guide world)—would dump six-days and 30 people’s worth of food, now lamentably human excrement, into the tanker through the slightly-too-small port hole.

In those days, a river toilet comprised a garbage bag inside a 40 mm rocket box with a toilet seat customized to fit the rocket box. There might be five or six full garbage bags by the end of a trip. So, one guy held the bag; the other guy cut the knot off the bag. Then together they would try to pour everything from the bag into the tanker. It usually worked.

The Main Salmon has a monster of a shuttle, basically from Riggins to Salmon, which could be anywhere from 8 hours to 24 hours long, back before certain sections of the drive were paved. Thanks to the giant swath of Rocky Mountains running vertically through the state, there was no going “across” Idaho. So, each week the crew debated whether to take the “northern route” or the “southern route.” North took us from Riggins north over Whitebird Pass to Kooskia, across the Lolo Pass to Darby, Montana, then south to Salmon. The southern route was down through McCall and Banks, across the mountains to Stanley, then back north to Salmon. Both were scenic, riddled with potential disasters, and long.

Once upon a time, my friend Hunter and I did a three-boat trip on the Main Salmon with a third, to my recollection, nameless rent-a-guide. Hunter and I chose the north route this time. And while these shuttles were rough on occasion, there was a certain romantic beauty to them: the flush of freedom crossing great stretches of the Rockies with tons of gear, some warm beer, and a few good friends.

As Hunter remembers it:

“We would’ve come over Lolo pass in the early evening or so, but it seems like we picked up more beer and more fuel in Lolo, and it would’ve been one of those beautiful Montana summer evenings that I just fucking loved. For me, it was one of the highlights of guiding: good, beautiful people doing good, beautiful things in good, beautiful country. And it was summer in the West, so there were fires. But I don’t remember that trip as being smoky or hellish. It was just a nice drive after a nice trip. But the smokejumpers were, as always, busy that year and they had made camp in Darby, which for some reason, forced highway 93 traffic to detour briefly off the main road with the plan to get us back on 93 in the next mile or so…”

Well, not so.

We followed a thousand cones and detour signs with arrows pointing north and south, east and west, as the daylight drained away, the road narrowed, and the asphalt gave in to dirt. Then we started climbing and climbing and climbing, our dually Ford 250 and trailer roaring into the dark of night. This was a little concerning, but we were certain we had followed all the detour signs.

After telling ourselves this for over an hour, we suddenly seemed to be on some sort of Forest Service or logging road in a dense, black forest. Of course, this was pre Google Maps days, and a paper map was not one of the 5,000 items of unknown importance on the trip, so there was no telling where we were.

The first inkling of trouble (besides the dirt road, darkness, and paucity of people, cars, or civilization) was when our not very bright headlights flashed on a small, wooden Forest Service sign: “4 WD Road. No Turnouts. No Trailers Beyond This Point.”

And now they tell us? We had been on a narrow 4 WD road for, at least, 30 minutes. Not that it mattered at this point. With a truck and trailer loaded to the gills, there was no turning back, around, or any other which way but forward.

So, we went forward, the forest closing in on us. At one point, we saw another small wooden sign that read: Shoup, Idaho 41 miles.

“Shoup?”

Shoup was not on our route, not even near our route. In fact, Shoup seemed like it should be an entire mountain range—maybe even a state—away. And Shoup, by the way, was not even a town. Named after George Shoup, first governor of Idaho, Shoup was a bend in a dirt road. Maybe 10 people—all related—lived there.

Disgruntled, we carried on and wound our way on the logging road for another hour. Then a another sign: Shoup, Idaho 43 miles.

Say what?

Well past midnight now, Cinderella’s coach had definitely turned into a pumpkin. And that pumpkin had apparently entered some sort of space-time wrinkle in the universe.

Another 30 minutes of driving and another sign: Horse Creek Pass.

We had never heard of Horse Creek Pass, nor where it was a pass to. For all we knew, we could be dropping down on to the wrong side of the Continental Divide. The good news was that we were no longer climbing a mountain and had begun descending a mountain. The bad news was that the road started switching back and forth like a giant rope flaked out by God, or some particularly demented road builder. And the further bad news was that “lilies” had appeared, which Hunter quickly dubbed “death lilies.” These were some sort of mysterious flower that began to line our already skinny little road clinging to the mountain. There was no natural reason in hell those flowers should be there. Surely, this was an omen, and not a good one.

Hunter’s memory, younger and better than mine, goes something like this:

“My recollection (or perhaps this is just how my mind turns an event into a story that ends up turning into an epic saga) is that we passed the smoke jumpers camp, with dozens of tents and several helicopters, 1 or 2 with blades still slowing down the last few rotations of its last flight in the last of that day’s light and before the pitch black. If we truly were along the edge of the Painted Rock Reservoir, (which, in retrospect, I think we were) I didn’t see it. And because I was young and inexperienced with a trailer, or high from the beers, or the company in the truck, or the lovely situation of being 22 and not working in a fucking Texaco station or cleaning windows or whatever life could have thrown at me, one thing was for certain: I didn’t want to try to find a place to turn that trailer around and head back down the hill only to realize that we in fact didn’t go far ENOUGH, which would’ve meant turning the rig around AGAIN and take the ridicule of THAT, so, whenever queried I acted as if I knew nothing at all, and continued on …

“I don’t know if it would’ve been before Horse Creek Pass or not, but at some point, I remember driving through a forest of pecker pole pines that were all about arm’s length away from each other and thinking, ‘fuck me!’

“I seem to remember us getting out of the truck, maybe somewhere in those switchbacks, and trying to scout out a plan for turning the trailer around and thinking, ‘There is absolutely no way that even the most adept at trailer work can do anything good here.’ I also remember being in the switchback section and thinking, ‘These switchbacks are too steep and two jackknifed for anybody to get this trailer out of here and that there would be Echo lore about the trailer that still sits up on Horse Creek Pass… and that this is how my guiding career ends… My legacy with Echo River Trips would be of ‘the guy who left a rig and an entire Main Salmon trip way up on that hill right there…”

“I remember being unnerved for the whole night. Even after the switchbacks ended, and the gradient began to decrease. Even when we got down to the road along the Main Salmon. I was wracked by that shuttle, really, even after we got back to the house, found whatever was in my mailbox, had a few more beers. I think I can even remember lying in the back of my truck in my little comfortable sleep cubby, with just another hour or two of darkness before sunrise began, and my body was awash in something—crisis narrowly averted—and relief … like when you’re speeding along a dark highway and a big elk jumps in front of your truck, and he’s so fucking close to your windshield that you two make eye contact, and yet you miss him and keep on driving.”

The road to Shoup did, in fact, carry us to Shoup, Idaho, population 10. From there, even mice driving a pumpkin could get back to the guide house. It was nearly dawn, and soon we would gather with the other guides, tell the tale, and head down to the Salmon River Inn for pork chops and eggs, black coffee, and some laughs. The local ranchers there, all in big hats, some with pistols by their side, would eye us suspiciously for a bit. But soon enough, they and we would forget we were from different worlds and fall into just being a bunch of folks in a diner.

It turns out that a little faith and friendship can carry you a long way. It also turns out that despite all signs and omens telling you otherwise, if you just keep going, and keep going, and keep going, you will, in fact, end up where you started.