Sacajawea Interpretive, Cultural & Educational Center

As usual, we woke early and read for a while, did our German lessons and chatted until we heard Mark in the kitchen.

After Cindy got up, we went for a longer walk along irrigation canals on BLM land adjacent to their property. As we walked, we picked up a few stones that we thought were pretty and might polish well for Peter. We saw irrigation canals through the desert that are in use for watering the alfalfa as well as some abandoned canals that have been replaced by water pipelines. When we got back to the house, Mark made another good breakfast. This morning he made oatmeal with berries and pecans for breakfast which was very tasty on the cool morning.

Osprey with a fish from the Salmon River

After breakfast, Mark and I went outside to look for potential areas where the cluster flies could gain entry into the house. Our first place to look was the attic vents, but they appeared to have secure screen covering. We checked around the large bank of windows in the great room. While we couldn’t find an obvious space, a crack the thickness of a credit card is all that is required to let cluster flies in. We read that once the flies gain entry they use a pheromone signal to let other flies know of the passage. Mark found a fly repellant spray that we tried around the windows and eves, but we suspected that caulking the windows and using a stronger insecticide may be more helpful.

After we cleaned up from spraying, we drove the short distance to the Pahsimeroi Fish Hatchery.  Here they capture migrating salmon, extract the eggs and milt and then raise the hatchlings until they are ready for release into local streams. The rearing ponds were covered by tarps to protect from eagles and other predatory birds, so it was difficult to see the fish. However, we could see that there were large steelhead and chinook salmon that came from the small stream after making the long trip from the Pacific Ocean.

Dugout Dick's house

Our next stop was to the site of the Idaho Hermit. Dugout Dick (Richard Zimmerman) was a hobo riding the trains in the 1930s and 40s. In 1948 he settled on a parcel of land along the Salmon River and dug a small dwelling into the side of the upper riverbank beside a fertile river bottom. In the years that he lived there, he enlarged his home using chunks of angular basalt from the hillside above his house and rounded stones from the river. He planted plum, cherry and pear trees as well as a small garden. When the Bureau of Land Management acquired the land along the Salmon River, Dick was permitted to remain in his home until his death in 2010. He became well known and was interviewed by National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazines as well as Good Morning America. He was a guest on the Tonight Show on more than one occasion. In order to support himself, he opened his home to guests who could spend the night in his dugout cabin for 25 cents. He would also pose for photographs and play his guitar for guests.

We drove north to Salmon where we visited the Sacajawea Interpretive, Cultural & Educational Center. When we arrived, we noticed a pickup in the parking lot with West Virginia tags. I went into the visitor center to pay the small entry fee, and the volunteer working desk noticed that I was wearing a Marshall University shirt and asked what I knew about Marshall. She explained that she lives in St. Albans and spends a few weeks in Idaho while her husband works as a hunting guide. When Mark came in, we learned that her name is Linda and that she graduated from high school with Mark’s older sister,

We enjoyed the small but well designed visitor center and learning about the difficult life of Sacajawea who grew up along the Salmon River not far from the visitor center. She was raised as a Lemhi Shoshone but was captured by another tribe at around age 12, perhaps in 1800, and held as a captive. She was ultimately sold to a French trapper in the Lewis and Clark party who took her as one of his wives. Sacajawea’s son was given the nickname “Pompy” by William Clark and was said to be a favorite among the party of explorers. Clark ultimately adopted and educated Sacajawea’s two children. There is no certainty regarding the life of Sacajawea after she rendered valuable assistance to the Lewis and Clark especially in communicating with local natives. It has been long believed that Sacajawea died at the age of 25, however, some believe that the woman who died was the French trapper’s other wife, Otter Woman, and that Sacajawea married into the Comanche tribe and lived into her 90s.

Replica fish weir

In the visitor center we learning about Lewis’s Woodpecker and Clark’s Nutcracker. Mark and Cindy have seen Lewis’s Woodpecker, and we saw many Clark’s Nutcrackers on our trips later in the week. Around the visitor center there is an interpretative trail with displays of Shoshone dwellings from around the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as a fish weir and other artifacts.

While we were in Salmon, Mark called their friend, Rich, a retired teacher from Mt. Edgecumbe School in Sitka, Alaska. Mark and Cindy knew him when they lived in Alaska, and Robert attended Mt. Edgecumbe. Rich is an avid hunter and took us through his trophy room where he has mounts of mountain goat, bighorn sheep, leopard, bison, elk, wolverine and many other domestic and African animals that he has shot. The room is a bonus room on his second floor that has beautiful acacia wood floors with inlays from Africa. It was all very impressive and quite a lot to take in.

We enjoyed Rich very much and invited him to join us for dinner at the Dusty Mule, one of the few restaurants in Salmon. As we were entering the restaurant, Mary saw something moving on a mountain top and got the binoculars to see that there were bighorn sheep on the mountain. They were difficult to see because of the dense smoke from forest fires. There were flakes of ash constantly falling like snow and landing on our cars.

Burgers from 1/3 pound of Lemhi County beef are the specialty of the Dusty Mule so we all ordered one. Mary had the Saucy Mule with BBQ sauce and onion rings on the side. Rich and I had the Kickin’ Mule with blue cheese, caramelized onion, bacon, ham, pepper jack and jalapeno peppers with a side of onion rings. Mark and Cindy got Albino Mules with Swiss cheese and caramelized onions. We all enjoyed our meals.

We arrived back at the Whittington’s home for the ritual nightly fly killing. As in previous evenings, Cindy used her vacuum cleaner with a long attachment to vacuum thousands of cluster flies around the windows of the house. As soon as she would get them vacuumed from one set of windows and move on to another window, more flies would return to the first windows. They had to be coming into the house in vast numbers. Each evening. Cindy would remove thousands of dead flies from her vacuum.

Before bed, Cindy and Mary worked on the jigsaw puzzle in the second floor loft that Cindy uses as an office. We turned in around 10 pm and seemed to be getting adjusted to Mountain Time.