Payette National Forest

Payette National Forest covers about 2.3 million acres of rugged west-central Idaho, climbing from the deep granite canyons of the Salmon River -- the legendary 'River of No Return' -- up to the jagged Seven Devils Mountains that stand above Hells Canyon on the Oregon line. Its front door is McCall, an easygoing town on the shore of Payette Lake, and the forest holds the largest share of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the biggest contiguous wild area left in the lower 48. Cool twist: the salmon and steelhead that spawn in these headwaters swim some of the longest migrations of any fish in the world -- close to 900 miles up from the Pacific, and the highest-climbing runs in the country -- just to get here.

The place

Payette National Forest spreads across about 2.3 million acres of west-central Idaho -- big, steep, granite country where deep river canyons, high lake basins, and long ridges of ponderosa pine and fir climb toward the Salmon River Mountains and the Seven Devils. Its western edge runs right along the Snake River at the Oregon line, and its front door -- the friendly lake town of McCall, set on the shore of Payette Lake -- is the forest's heart. From there the land turns wild fast: the Main Salmon, the 'River of No Return,' cuts through the north, a big chunk of the eastern backcountry lies inside the Frank Church wilderness, and off to the west the Seven Devils rise straight up out of Hells Canyon, often called the deepest river gorge on the continent.

History

The forest takes its name from Francois Payette, a French-Canadian fur trapper and trader who trapped and traded across the Snake River country for the Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1800s and later kept the books at Fort Boise; the Payette River, Payette Lake, and this forest all carry his name. The national forest itself was pieced together out of the forest reserves set aside in the first years of the 1900s, in the same conservation wave under Theodore Roosevelt that created so much of the national-forest system. Long before any of that, this was homeland to the Nez Perce and Shoshone-Bannock peoples, whose trails followed the same salmon runs. The early-1900s gold rush at Thunder Mountain drew a stampede of miners into the remote high country, and later the Stibnite mine to the east became a nationally important source of antimony and tungsten -- strategic metals that mattered a great deal during World War II.

Wildlife & plants

This is classic Idaho big-game country: Rocky Mountain elk and mule deer, black bears in the berry brush, and mountain lions you will almost never see. The Seven Devils and other high, rocky ground hold mountain goats and bighorn sheep, and gray wolves have spread back through the backcountry since their reintroduction to central Idaho. But the signature animals here are the fish -- wild chinook salmon and steelhead that climb all the way from the ocean to spawn in these cold headwater streams, though those runs are now protected and struggling under the Endangered Species Act, along with bull trout and native cutthroat. The forest itself runs from ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir on the warm, dry slopes up through lodgepole and subalpine fir toward timberline, with bald eagles and osprey working the lakes and rivers.

Notable features

The showpiece is the Main Salmon River -- the 'River of No Return' -- one of the great wilderness whitewater trips in the country, running free through the heart of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Payette holds the largest share of that wilderness (roughly a third of the ~2.3-million-acre unit, which it manages jointly with several neighboring forests), the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48. On the western edge stand the Seven Devils Mountains, a compact, dramatic range whose peaks -- He Devil, She Devil, The Ohio, and their neighbors -- top out near 9,400 feet and look straight down into Hells Canyon, widely cited as the deepest river gorge in North America. At the center of it all is Payette Lake at McCall, with Brundage Mountain and Little Ski Hill nearby for winter, and the South Fork of the Salmon draining the country in between.

Cool to know

• The salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Payette's headwaters make one of the longest freshwater migrations of any fish on Earth -- and the highest-climbing in the lower 48 -- swimming close to 900 river miles and thousands of feet of elevation up the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers from the Pacific Ocean, just to reach the streams where they hatched.
• Hells Canyon, on the forest's western edge, is widely cited as the deepest river gorge in North America -- measured from the Snake River up to the summits of the Seven Devils, it is deeper, by that yardstick, than the Grand Canyon.
• The Main Salmon earned the nickname 'River of No Return' back when boats could run down the big rapids but could not fight their way back upstream, so early wooden scows were often broken up for lumber at the bottom -- a one-way trip.
• McCall is home to one of the oldest smokejumper bases in the country, set up in 1943; firefighters have been parachuting into this remote, roadless backcountry to catch fires for roughly eighty years.
• The Thunder Mountain gold rush of the early 1900s drew thousands of hopeful miners deep into this rugged country -- often counted among the last big gold rushes in the lower 48 -- and the boom faded almost as fast as it flared.
• McCall throws a Winter Carnival every year built around giant snow sculptures carved all over town -- a small mountain community that draws big crowds out to see the ice-and-snow artwork in the dead of winter.