What, an antique shop in Spirit Lake that sells Lionel model trains? Learning this, I soon covered the forty miles north of Coeur d’Alene to Spirit Lake’s Main Street.
Turning left from Idaho Highway 41, I was immediately taken by two blocks of early Idaho stone-and-wood commercial architecture. The buildings, up to three stories tall, were well-maintained and mostly open for business, but they were not gussied up. The kid in me couldn’t wait to get out of the car but had to wait for a parking space in the second block, across the street from the antique shop.
While it was the kid in me who jumped out of the car into this Idaho townscape, it was all of me who had to stop in the middle of Main Street, say out loud, “I love it,” and reach for my camera. “It” was the coolest water tower I’d ever seen—a huge and handsome blue coffee pot.
In the train and antiques shop, owner Helen Campilli told me she bought her husband a toy train set many years ago, “Something we didn’t even know existed. He was raised too poor and I was raised on a farm away from everything.” After that gift of love, they collected Lionel trains for years and finally decided to open a shop to get rid of some of them. That led to buying more, applying to be a franchise, and going at it ever since. These days, Helen admits the shop is a way to keep her out of the rocking chair.
We enjoyed a pleasant chat and as I made a small purchase, I mentioned how much I liked the amazing coffee pot water tower. I was immediately corrected. “That is not a coffee pot, it is a teapot. A lady who lived here loved teapots and when she died, her daughter fixed up the water tower to be a teapot in her memory.”
Wow. Continue reading
A Returnee Learns Some Legends and Has a Really Strange Day
by Amy Larson
I thought I knew all about Lava Hot Springs. Although I live in the Treasure Valley now, our family moved to eastern Idaho when I was ten, and I’ve been to the resort town numerous times. At seventeen, I jumped off the high dive at the Olympic Swimming Complex. Ten meters doesn’t sound that dizzying, but it converts to almost thirty-three feet. Here’s a tip on that one: don’t have your friends cheer you on from below, and make absolutely, positively sure your hands are at your sides when you hit the water. Second-degree burns on your palms from a “water burn” can be hard to explain. Continue reading
On a day in May 2006, it was so unseasonably hot at the Idaho Botanical Garden (IBG) in Boise that canopies were erected to provide shade for attendees at the grand opening of the Lewis and Clark Native Plant Garden.
I was there that day, a local botanist and avid native plant gardener who had served on an advisory committee for the new garden. At the time, I didn’t know that the following spring I would join the IBG horticultural team as the person responsible for making the native plant garden grow. Continue reading
My friend Betty and I crouched in the sagebrush taking pictures of the flowers up on the Midvale Hill. She said, “My neighbor used to ski up here.”
“What?” I replied. “Skied? You can’t be serious.”
“Yes. A rancher pulled skiers uphill in his logging sleds.”
She must have been mistaken. There wouldn’t have been enough snow for a ski area here. I snapped a few more photos, thinking only of focus and aperture, trying to capture the vast hillside of buckwheat and arrowleaf balsamroot in bloom, the gold and the cream flowers accented by purple evening shadows.
A few years later, when my oldest son Doug got a Christmas present of a book on Montana’s former ski areas, he said, “Mom, you should write a book on Idaho ski areas, all the lost areas. I bet Idaho has more than Montana.”
I told him no, I didn’t know enough about skiing. He should find someone in the ski business to do it, or write it himself. “You’re the one who knows about skiing,” I said. He had been head coach at a Wyoming ski area for seven years and for a Colorado area for another year before he got tired of the parents of the young racers and went to grad school. Doug kept after me for a year, until I agreed to write the book. I agreed only after he said he’d help me. Soon I was receiving long lists of ski areas from him by e-mail, and bits of information on famous skiers I had never heard of.
That’s how I found myself in the Weiser library, scrolling through microfilm of the Weiser Signal and Weiser American on an ancient reader that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I had remembered what Betty said, and had asked her what year it was that her neighbor skied. She told me it was in the 1930s, and I started looking through the papers beginning after Sun Valley opened in December 1936. Continue reading
This was a bad idea,” I told myself as I drove up Highway 45, south of Nampa. Curious about a place friends had told me of, Cleo’s Trail, I decided to take an afternoon off from work and visit. Two problems: I got a late start, and it was raining buckets.
With wipers on full speed, I was questioning my wisdom, or lack thereof. Then something interesting happened. The closer I got to Cleo’s Trail, near the Snake River, the better the weather got. Driving over the last hill, the clouds parted and the rain stopped. My mood brightened, too, and I sensed I was about to have a singular experience.
Before me was the old Walter’s Ferry site. To the left were two houses, with an open gate beyond them. An overhead sign read, “This place was built as a vibrant faith adventure.” That sounds like something I can use, I thought. I could see several old-style houses, barns, and a little chapel. To the left was a vacant parking lot, and I found out why. The trail closed at five. I looked at my watch: 4:45. Fifteen minutes to explore. I decided I would snap some photos and move quickly through.
The very first sign slowed my pace. “You are my special friend and visitor today,” it said. Who was this Cleo, and did she really mean it? I looked around, noticing I was surrounded by a courtyard full of children at play. Sculptures of children being read to on benches by parents, children doing cartwheels, and masquerading as caped superheroes. I started grinning, something I hadn’t done all day. The sculpture of two children holding hands and galloping off toward adventure triggered a memory of my older sister and me. She was always dragging me around to something or somewhere, but whatever she dragged me to was often fun. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Continue reading
The autumn sun filtered through towering trees as I shuffled through the leaves on the floor of the eighty-acre Draper Preserve in Hailey. Suddenly, I came upon a sixteen-foot steel arrow with three-foot fletches sticking out of the ground.
“What the—?”
As I studied the arrow, it became apparent that it was pointing to a new bridge spanning the Big Wood River. But this was not just any bridge. It was a beautifully crafted structure of Douglas fir in the shape of a bow. A recurve bow, to be precise—a target precision-shooting bow, with wingtips that curve away from the archer when the bow is strung, to give the arrow more acceleration.
The 160-foot Bow Bridge’s designer, Sun Valley resident Leslie Howa, stood on it squinting into the sun as she sized up the twenty-pound leaf made of galvanized steel that Erik Nilsen was about to hang from its rafters. “I told the Wood River Land Trust I’m not a bridge builder, but I have an idea for a design like no other,” she told me as she took a breather.
Leslie, who studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, was for years a designer of backcountry and other outdoor clothing for large corporations. She helped start a clothing company that specializes in mountaineering and climbing wear, even while doing industrial community art projects on the side for cities like Ogden, Utah. The bridge, designed for the Wood River Land Trust, helps fulfill a dream that the trust’s director, Scott Boettger, has held of beautifying this area of river ever since he moved here in 1997. Continue reading
