Wilderness river: Selway sets the beat, rafters follow

Most folks don’t know it, but a trip down the Selway River in North Idaho would do them a world of good. Out there, far from Facebook, and iPhones, and electronic “friends,” life is reduced to its most elemental rhythms.

For a few blissful days, paddlers on the Selway pass through a spectacular, primal landscape. There’s plenty to see.

Eagles patrol the heavens while grumpy-sounding ducks, clearly late for something, fly upstream at low elevation. Canyon wrens blurt out merry melodies, belted kingfishers sing raspier songs, and Western tanagers flit through the foliage. On the floral side of the ledger, the Idaho state flower – syringa – blooms at water’s edge and western redcedars cast long shadows. Thorny hawthorns clutch and tear at unwary pedestrians, often drawing blood.

It’s a place where nature has the upper hand and humans are mere visitors who cannot remain. For beleaguered members of the rat race, the wild and scenic Selway River is a tonic to the soul.

Some friends and I were there last month, running a few attention-grabbing rapids by day and camping on sandy beaches at night. The river was pretty low, so the whitewater – though consequential in places – wasn’t the main attraction.

No, it’s the solitude and unspoiled nature that set the Selway apart. Our 47-mile trip lasted five days and we didn’t see another soul until the final hours of our final day.

Solitude is in short supply these days, but the Selway still has plenty left.

Any trip down the Selway requires a lot of driving. For starters, my friends and I drove to Missoula, Montana, and then turned south – up the Bitterroot River – on US 93 to Darby. Not far south of Darby, we turned up the West Fork of the Bitterroot and drove another few miles to the West Fork Ranger District office of the Bitterroot National Forest.

The permit holder was a childhood friend of mine – from kindergarten! – and he stepped inside to complete the permit formalities. There wasn’t much to it, just providing the names of everyone in our group, as well as the number of rafts and kayaks we planned to use.

We offered to show off our portable toilet, but the Forest Service staff waved us away with a smile and a simple admonition to “Leave No Trace.” That’s a nice maxim for small, self-supported kayak trips, but it’s unsustainably unsanitary for large, raft-supported trips that generate a lot of human waste at every campsite. Backcountry ethics and common courtesy dictate that rafters bring their own turd cage.

With boat permits in hand, we left the West Fork Ranger District office and began the final 50-mile approach to the launch site at Paradise. Along the way, the road rose up, crested Nez Perce Pass, and then dropped into Idaho and the Selway River drainage.

The launch site at Paradise is nothing special, just a set of stairs and a funky wooden ramp for coercing rafts, coolers, dry boxes and other equipment from the road down to the river.

We spent a few hours rigging our boats, then moseyed another quarter-mile up the road to a Forest Service campground that’s popular with Selway parties on the night before their launch.

One by one, other members of our group trickled in from different points of the compass – first a truck from Walla Walla, and then another from Salt Lake City. With the boats rigged and ready to go, there was nothing left to do but cook a hearty dinner in the open air, crack a beer, and launch into an endless succession of improbable river stories.

A whiff of apprehension was in the air as we prepared to launch the next morning. The river was low, only 1.1 feet on the gauge at the ramp, and rocks were poking out everywhere. The raft skippers were understandably anxious about getting hung up.

Fortunately, we had a skookum crew for our fleet of four gear rafts, one paddle raft, and one kayak.

Loaded with equipment and controlled by a single person, the gear boats faced the greatest challenge. To minimize hang-ups, we bled some air out of the tubes and kept the rafts squishy, rather than firm. Armed with a long pair of oars, the skippers then threaded their way through the maze – getting hung-up occasionally, but swiftly freeing themselves to continue their lumbering trek downstream.

The paddle raft, on the other hand, was the nautical equivalent of a sports car. Powered by five people wielding canoe paddles, it carried almost no gear and had a better power-to-weight ratio than even our kayaker. Four of the paddlers were river novices – but they were hearty, strong novices, and the skipper swiftly forged them into a tight, capable crew.

And then there was the kayaker, essentially a mooch, who earned his corn now and then by scouting the spooky sections. He helped free a couple of stuck rafts and picked up the pieces when the paddle raft – with a student driver at the helm – ejected all of its passengers.

Day after day, we spent our mornings packing up equipment – the stove, the tables, the chairs, the tents, and everything else – then lashing it onto the gear boats. At first glance, it looked like it would never fit, but in the end, it always did. A multi-day river trip is, above all else, a moveable feast.

Once underway, we lost ourselves in the deep embrace of nature.

In its upper reaches, the Selway has a lot in common with its better-known Idaho cousin, the Middle Fork of the Salmon. Overhead, blue sky and white clouds give way to steep, grassy slopes dominated by ragged, golden cliffs. Lower still, mighty Ponderosa pines – the living embodiment of Salmon River country – line the water’s edge.

Finally, there is the river itself.

Clear as bootleg gin, the water gathers pace as it riffles over cobbled bars where every rock is clearly visible. Then it runs strong and hard for a bit before slowing and pooling in deep green swirls. At the downstream end of every pool, the riverbed rises up, the water gets shallower until it glides over a subtle inflection point, and the sequence unfolds anew. It’s a pattern that repeats itself thousands of times on a river’s journey to the sea.

Riffle. Run. Pool. Glide.

Virtually every river on earth follows the same pattern, but the Selway does it with uncommon elegance and grace.

Constantly on the move, ever restless, the river produces its own soundtrack – sibilant and soothing most of the time, but loud and ominous in the major rapids. At night, it is the white noise that lulls weary paddlers to sleep. In the morning, it is the gentle alarm clock that eases them back to consciousness.

On the Selway, all hearts beat with the pulse of the river.