#410 Salmon River #1 Stanley, ID Forest Road 434 Boondock

We arrived in Stanley not knowing a whole lot about the area but I had several boondocks already picked out I figured I would try to find the best one. If you arrive there on a Wednesday or Thursday you can probably find a site but if you wait till the weekend it'll be too late so I felt an urgency to find something. We rode through a pay place that was operated by the national forests but because everything's a boondock and there's no water available at the sites why pay 20 bucks a night for what's available a mile away for free.

We needed to play it safe so we went up to the national forest dump station and filled our tanks with water. After that, I picked the first available dispersed site that looked good to me. It was legal and it was on a bluff way above the river. You can see the river and it was beautiful but you wouldn’t have any access to it without a real tough hike. I had read about another possibility and wanted to take a look at all my options. I felt like parking here was my sure thing so I dropped the rig and then went looking around a little bit in just the truck. We would have been fine here but I always wanted to be better if it were possible.

We took a look at a place that was down on the river and was called salmon number one. It was of course all dirt roads off of the main road. It was a sharp turn off the main road that would have been a little spooky in the rig but I felt confident it was doable. We went on down a pretty rutted-out road for a while then it did a pretty steep very bumpy descent towards the river. The whole time I was doing it I was trying to make sure can I go down this hill and can I get back up this hill in our big rig. I'm really happy we did get four-wheel drive and the truck is brand new so it gave me pause but I felt confident we could do it. It would be a nail-biter but that's exactly what it said on freecamp.net. The review said It’s a great site but it's a little tough on a big rig. It was the perfect site so I went back got the rig and came on back hoping nothing changed. I could have got there and found it occupied but wow I was so pleased it was still available. We slid right in there and we stayed quite a few days. It was right by the river probably only 20 feet from the river's edge.

It was gorgeous. Pic I had intended to start using river water to refill my tanks and I wanted to do that all summer in Idaho.

I had ordered a gadget that could sterilize the water after it's in the tank using ozone and I was waiting for it to arrive. I was as happy as a big fat pig rolling in poop. I felt like you would have to pay $100 for a site this gorgeous and here we were for free.

It was warm but much cooler than in Twin Falls and in the other parts of the country, we had been at recently probably 90 for the high. Nice and cool overnight which was great.

We hiked and enjoyed the area. We went to the library in town at Stanley which has a very small winter population of about 68 pic people but it's in the thousands during the summer.

I bought a two-day fishing license and tried to fly fish and it didn't seem like I had any bites but sure enjoyed trying. A bad day fishing beats a great day working. All in this area everywhere you look boondocking was encouraged and allowed. There were some places where it wasn't but there was so much cool free camping in this part of the world and I really enjoyed the whole experience.

One day we rode up towards Clayton which has a population of seven.

It was just kind of crazy how Idaho does not believe in guardrails. I was kind of spooked on a regular basis at how if you don't watch it you'll just drive right off the cliff. It’s a heck of a way to have to pay attention as the consequences are really severe.

The Clayton area seems to be a forgotten area but there was occasionally a house here and there but very sparsely populated. I guess you just come by here to get away from it all. After India and I had driven all the way to Clayton which was a little over an hour we didn't see anything that we needed out that way and we figured that we would end up near Stanley or Ketchum for most of our time here.

India was not as excited about the hot springs as I was so the next day I went off by myself and I was going to do some fly fishing and soak in the hot springs along the road. After the fishing, I ended up finding a really nice hot spring that had been built by the CCC camps back in the depression. I walked on down to where it hot water came out and at first it was a little hard to figure out how to corral the hot water. If you move the stones around enough you can finally create a very hot area for yourself and then eventually it was too hot I had to let some cool water in. I met some full-time folks and we all soaked together and it was quite a wonderful experience. The water was so incredibly hot I mean boiling hot so you had to be careful. Eventually, I headed on back to the rig very refreshed from a great day on the river.

Once we decided to take the job at the Nature Center we wanted to go and at least enjoy a little bit of time at the hot springs we told them that we could be there in 30 days and they said that will be okay.

That means we didn't have to completely drop everything but we had to kind of get moving soon. We had stayed in Idaho for another week is and now we would go down to Twin Falls.

At that point, we would typically meander across the country by driving two hours staying two nights. The thought occurred to me that since it's a hundred degrees and we will be going across the Nevada desert from Idaho it was just going to be so hot that who would want to drag that out. It just made sense to get that really hot part over with all at once so I decided just to drive an awful lot and do 600 miles in two days. We drove straight through to Twin Falls which was about 3 hours to the fairgrounds which was now available.

Forest Road 434 Stanley, ID

GPS: 44.1811, -114.929

Salmon River #1

Sawtooth National Forest

Idaho-75 Stanley, ID

GPS: 44.1768, -114.9237