I’m heading down to the Imnaha canyon for the week. Get out your Wallowa County vacation itinerary if you haven’t made it to Imnaha yet. Here’s one of the reasons I live out here. You got the lovely mountains. Check. Rivers. Check. Big old Zumwalt Prairie. And then things drop off a couple thousand feet into rimrock canyons and warmer climes where the bighorn sheep roam and gardens grow tomatoes the size of softballs.

It’s a geography sample platter squeezed into one relatively small area, that still manages to be big and roomy at the same time. Try the comparison tour. Get out here and hike up to the alpine lakes, float a river the next day and head down to Imnaha the next. They're different worlds. And worth exploring.

The town of Imnaha is 33 miles from Joseph. There’s a handful of houses. A school. A tavern and store famous for their fried chicken gizzards. If you take a left, you wind down toward Cow Creek or Dug Bar and hit the Snake River. Go straight from town to climb to Hat Point, where there’s a fire lookout and you get a visual on why Hells Canyon is the deepest canyon in the lower 48 states.

I’ll be heading upstream 13 miles to a writing retreat run by Fishtrap, a local nonprofit that puts on a writing conference in the summer and fall. There’s a log house on a bend in the Imnaha River, accessible only by an Indiana Jones-style suspension bridge. You hike your gear across and settle down for a week with a group of people who are all working on different projects.

The usual routine is to write during the day. Then take a hike. Do some fishing. Photography. Whatever. Then everyone gets together for dinner and you retire to the living room to sit around a fire and give your writing a test run while everyone discusses or reads what they’re working on.

This year I’ll explore some of the side creeks and a gorge in the upper river that I’ve wandered before, happily doing nothing but scrambling around on the rocks.

There’s another gorge downstream from town that Morgan and Paul have seen, but I’ve yet to float through and that’s high on my list. I won’t get to it this week, but that is a chunk of river I’ve been wanting to lay eyes on.

About those chicken gizzards at the Imnaha Tavern. I do believe you have to try them. Officially, they’re gross. But when in Rome you sometimes eat gross things. And I’ve done my share by taking friends and family there, ordering these deep-fried nuggets of . . . I don’t know precisely what a gizzard is. It’s been explained to me before, but I block certain things from my consciousness as a survival tactic.

That’s what the Man vs. Wild TV show should have done, is have Bear Grylls survive in the canyon on nothing but Imnaha Tavern fried gizzards.

So there’s my travel recommendation for this week. See Imnaha if you haven’t already. And if you have, get down there again. Canyon time is good for your gizzard.

From wetplanetsalmon

Crawled out of my tent Tuesday morning twenty feet from the Salmon River. Looked up and couldn’t help but notice the snowline was just 200 feet above the Salmon River. Crawled back in the tent to stay there until July. I would have, too, if Paul hadn’t put a fresh mug of coffee outside, close enough for me to smell it but far enough that I had to leave my sleeping bag to reach that sweet, caffeinated elixir. Damn you, coffee.

Next thing I know we’re shoving off for three days on the lower Salmon and I have to confess the weather got better, I was glad to be there and once again found myself patting myself on the back for leaving a so-called real job to work on the river.

Todd and Jaco brought some of the Wet Planet crew over from their Columbia Gorge headquarters on the White Salmon River. They had six kayakers in the water, plus passengers on our three rafts rowed by Paul, Morgan and myself. Didn’t see another soul until we hit the Snake River and got into jetboat territory. Not one person. Which is a definite upside to an earlyish spring trip with the snowline way down low.

The Salmon was running at 11 to 12,000 cubic feet per second while we were down there. That’s double what I’ve seen it at before. Turns out it’s a very easy flow. The usual rocks and shallow stretches were well under water. Snow Hole Rapid is much more forgiving at 11 thou and you don’t need to row your arms out of their sockets nearly as much through China Bar.

If you haven’t been on that lower Salmon stretch, I’ll just say that you can believe the hype. No dams, so the water is clear – excepting right now when spring runoff adds dirt and sand particles into the mix. But that’s a good thing, in the form of big white sandy beaches for deluxe campsites. You float through impressive canyons and my personal favorite thing to behold are the columnar basalt displays, which appear to be gigantic honeycombed rock crystals lining the shore in places.

Also interesting is the The Slide. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde river feature. Normally it’s nothing. A monster rock slide deposited a big, big pile of big, big boulders on the left side of the river. At low water, you wouldn’t even know it’s got a reputation as a rapid at all. You just bob through on gentle waves. In big water, though, say over 20,000 cfs, you’ll know. That pile of rocks shoves the river hard right and slams it into the opposite rock wall. In the mid-20s to 30,000 and up flows, you just don’t do it. Because you can’t. So my ears perked up as we floated toward the Slide and I could hear it a good long way up the canyon. I knew well the river wasn’t running anywhere near the 20-thousand danger zone. But still. I thought maybe I should take a sip of the hot chocolate and spiced rum concoction that my trusty crew, Lauren and Alison, had made to take the nip off the weather. Maybe two sips. Just in case I got thirsty in the next few minutes.

And it was nothing to be concerned about, the Slide at 12,000 cfs. Just a fun ride down a little wave train. So I took another sip to celebrate.

About that spring weather I mentioned last time . . . uhm . . . it’s gone.

Snowing this morning. Forecast is for highs in the 40s. A contradiction, really, to say temperatures in the 40s are high. Especially when you’re headed out on a river trip.

Paul, Morgan and I are heading for Idaho to float the lower Salmon for three days. We’re meeting up with our pals from Wet Planet, over in White Salmon, Washington. They do a kayak instruction trip that we provide camp support for. It’s a good way to go, if you’re looking to hone your kayaking skills. Get some world-class kayakers sharing the finer points by day, then roll into a Winding Waters campsite and relax.

But about that weather. I’ve just thrown into a drybag every scrap of fleece and polyprop- . . . polypropel- . . . hell, I don’t even know how to spell that. The high-tech stuff that keeps you warm. Wool socks and my yellow slicker foul weather gear that makes me look like I’m fishing for cod off the Grand Banks.

I’m hoping for no rain, anyway. Cold I can handle. I don’t like it, but it’s doable. Cold and wet is something else. I’m having a flashback right now. Cut to 1990-something. Scene: Glacier National Park. I’m driving down from Going-To-The-Sun Road in a huge red tour bus, which was my summer job in college. It’s pouring rain. And by pouring I mean pouring. My bus is empty since I dropped off my passengers back at the Many Glacier Hotel. I’m squinting through the windshield trying to see 50 feet through little tiny 1930s wiper blade semi-circles on that antique bus.

And out walks in front of me a badger. He is pissed. Wet, cold, his fur plastered down, he is in no mood for an antique bus with a guy peering through ridiculous 1930s windshield wipers.

The badger stopped, faced my bus and dared me to come any further. I did not. If I had gone closer, I believe he would have ripped opened the driver’s door, torn me apart, thrown me out in the storm and driven away with the heater on full blast.

So I waited. And eventually he let me pass, but we had some eye contact there and it’s one of the few times I think I’ve communicated with a four-legged creature. He said: I’m wet and cold and I don’t like it. I said back: Hey, I grew up outside of Eugene, Oregon. I know all about it.

That seemed to satisfy him and I think of that badger every time I’m wet and cold. I adopt the slightly pigeon-toed stance of the badger. And his scowl. My mood in that state allows for staring down tour buses and I just hope the rain holds off on the lower Salmon this week so the badger doesn’t take over.

I am looking forward to getting back on that river, though. If you haven’t floated through Blue Canyon yet, put that on your list of things to do. Beautiful.

Morgan and Paul should be pulling in any minute, so I’m going to get this off and check the weather one more time, hoping for a return to that glorious warm weather I was so excited about last week. Hopefully there’s a very slight chance of badgers.

The Wallowa Valley takes its own sweet time shifting from winter to spring. Not this year. I left town last week in a legitimate snowstorm with black ice coating the highway – then I got home yesterday and had to buy a newspaper to look at the date, make sure I hadn’t Rip Van Winkled and been gone longer than I thought.

It looks like somebody threw a switch. There were four tufts of pale green grass in my yard when I left. Now I need to get the mower tuned up. People were subsisting on seal blubber and boiling old leather boots to get by a week ago – then I get home and friends are having barbecues. The outdoor kind. It’s seasonal whiplash. I can hear the flowers growing outside and I wish they’d keep it down. It’s hard to concentrate with the racket of all those cells multiplying.

Witness the two photos: world-class iceberg-cicles growing off my roof taken not too very long ago, contrasted with the fields of green I’m soon going to have to mow, taken just this morning.

And that means rafting season is on, folks. I saw a party of steelheaders launching from Minam on my way out of town last week, and I pitied those fools for the cold weather camping they were about to endure. It reminded me of Shackelton’s crew.

Driving back yesterday, there was a group of young fellas floating the Grand Ronde outside of La Grande in inner tubes. Inner tubes, I tell you. It reminded me of a Norman Rockwell scene.

Now that it’s the season for messing around in boats, I’m looking at the calendar with a friendly eye, instead of counting the sticks of firewood in my pile, then consulting the calendar to see how soon I’ll need to start burning furniture.

That calendar is looking good. There are Snake River trips, a Salmon trip in my near future. I’m talking with my Dad about a couple stretches on the John Day we’d like to revisit and also we’re leaning toward a scenic float down the lower section of the Grand Ronde.

Morgan has the steelhead itch and mentioned scratching it either on the Wallowa, Imnaha, or maybe Grand Ronde. It all sounds good. Count me in. That grass can keep growing as far as I’m concerned. The mower sat in the garage all winter and it can keep on sitting there if the weather is going to be this accommodating.