Adventure Idaho by Wayne cook
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The Rocky Mountains have always commanded a sense of adventure for anyone who has ever read about them or seen them from the air, and the Sawtooth wilderness area of Idaho is one of the most adventure packed areas youll find in the world. Most of us in Alabama dream of pristine streams, mountain campsites, entire lakes to ourselves, sleeping on the ground and taking precautions so we dont become bear or mountain lion food. Im glad to saythat dream is not out of reach for those who have a spirit of adventure and a desire to get out there.

The desire for adventure has always been there for both of us, so this trip came down to putting all the pieces and parts in the right order AND making sure we were both in the physical condition to do the things we wanted to do. Narrowing our adventure area was easy, we had been to Stanley before and were looking forward to our return trip, so we had ideas about what we were getting into and this article just covers the basics of getting therebeing there will follow in the next few articles!

Drive or fly is a question everyone seemed to ask us. We had 7 days available, did we want to spend 5 or 6 days in a car driving or was that time worth $337 each for round trip airline tickets? NO BRAINER! Yahoo travel 30 days out and our tickets were set and paid for. We also used yahoo travel to reserve a munchkin car, and when we got to Boise we were able to upgrade at the airport to a 4WD SUV that just looked the part of mountain explorers for about $10 per day more!

There are hiking/fishing/exploring publications that cover the what to bring better than we could hope to, but the how to get it there is something that needs a bit of covering (and planning). If youve ever carried backpacks, camping equipment and fishing gear on airlines you know what fun it is to drag bulky heavy stuff around airports. And now with airlines charging extra just to take baggage, the option of shipping stuff to your destination is a great idea. We ended up shipping 2 large boxes each weighing about 52 pounds directly to our first night hotel room for less than $50 (and did the same thing back). There are lots of plusses here, my favorite was all the stress of packing was done a full week before the trip started, so that week before leaving we had lots of fun checking the UPS website to watch our gears progress and to simply enjoy the anticipation of being there. If youre nervous about doing this, compare lost package rates of UPS and airlines!

Other things we did before we ever left helped things flow smoothly. We were able to go online and purchase our non-resident fishing licenses, and its good we did because there was a system glitch that required the Idaho fish and game to fax our licenses to us! We also hired a fishing guide for a half day, this was a great investment in learning how to fish in Idaho, and gave us a light day of just enjoying the scenery with no pressure at all.

Finally, the day came and we woke up, drank coffee (and a diet coke) and headed to the airport, turned our cell phones off and rode the friendly skys all the way to Boise. When we arrived, we picked up our rental car (and got an upgrade at the counter) then make the gorgeous drive from Boise to Stanleyabout 3 hours.

When we arrived at Jerrys Country Store and Cabins we were told our bags were in our room and we finished part one of the journey sitting on the balcony of our room and just looking over the Salmon River and the Sawtooth Mountains. anxious to meet our fishing guide the next morning at 8:30!

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