Oregon & Southwest Idaho

The light has shifted in the gorge. The wrens know it with their inscrutable animal intelligence; they have begun to chatter, their songs twisting up the canyon walls, radiating through its shadowy interior. Up on the plateau, the fragrant sage is growing as green as it ever gets. Arrowleaf balsamroot, brave and hardy, has already begun to flower, but other desert blooms bide their time, anticipating warmer temperatures. The river rolls, same as it has all night—that timeless, implacable sound of water flowing alongside itself, pushing against canyon wall, around boulder, through fissure. After some time passes, the first sun hits the rim of the canyon, and the rhyolite glows gold. Lingering suggestions of winter in the air echo and fade. It is a spring morning in the Owyhee Canyonlands.

The whole anatomy of this place and all the shapes that characterize it have been dictated by the movement of water over time. But looking out onto the Owyhee plateau—a sparsely populated ocean of grass, sage, and juniper—one could remain completely unaware of the river flowing deep beneath the continuous sweep of southwest Idaho rangeland. This wild and lonely tributary originates in northwest Nevada. It whittles a dramatic, narrow canyon through the highlands, continues into Southeast Oregon, and eventually descends into the Snake River Plain near the Oregon-Idaho border. To float the Owyhee River is to travel with this ancient natural force, to experience the stories it has etched into the land—a story of water in the desert, as vital as it is ephemeral. A story of a strange, dusky earth with unfamiliar continents, when glowing molten rock rose through the planet’s crust in southern Idaho, hardening, then eroding. A story of the ebb and flow of seasons, the natural world’s ceaseless change and motion, and a severe and seemingly impenetrable landscape made malleable by the forces of water and time.

(Excerpt from The Owyhee: Desert River, Desert Stories, Dove Henry)