Where Do The Lowbaggers Go? By Josh Mahan When Summer hits, it's hard to find the wily Lowbagger.

MAIN SALMON RIVER, Idaho – I’m staring at the pictographs below Devil’s Teeth Rapids on the River of No Return. Zig-zagged lines drop vertically across the rock, accompanied by small slashes played out horizontally. No obvious images stand out in this message left for the ages. And left for whom? Surely not for some Lowbagger river guide to ponder hundreds of years later before digging into a plastic cooler for a cold one.

The location of the rock overhang that houses this particular pictograph is so seemingly obscure, and I wonder if chaos or intention has preserved it for the ages. Why choose this overhang in the millions of cubic feet of rock that exist in the Salmon River canyon? Known as the River of the Big Fish by the original inhabitants of the Salmon River, the rocky rapids above the pictograph must have been quite the bottle-neck for the prodigal salmon, finally home to breed. The backwater eddy beneath the rapid could have been the biggest grocery store in what is now known as central Idaho. Hence, the overhang in question would be the perfect place to post messages.  

For whatever reason, the jagged lines and short scratch marks struck me as an aboriginal Lowbagger message. One that said, “We caught 26 gigantic Big Fish over the past week. Where the hell are you? We’re hungry for sheep, and have moved down river, past the big bend.” These guys were Lowbaggers if I’ve ever heard of one. They slept on the beach with a rock for a pillow and had little use for more than a spear and a loin cloth.

Not that we’re any different here at Lowbagger. And our young web site sn’t all that different from the rock overhang that has preserved the word. Why check under our rock for a message? We’re right on the banks of the wildlands debate, delivering unfiltered news. If you’re thirsty for a view beyond the window mainstream newspapers and glossies offer, you’ve come to the right watering hole. Take a drink right from the river, baby!

Here’s what we can report from the wildest place in the continental U.S.: It ain’t so wild!

 The Salmon still flows with the vibrancy, unpredictability, and spirit that it has since time immemorial. Its surrounding forest is vast, and stands, almost sadly, as a museum of what the west was like before it was won. But, for all of its glory, the Salmon seems empty. The rocks are lonely. The native humans have been killed off, along with the grizzly and the river’s namesake – the big fish. Fenced from their spawning grounds by walls of concrete on the Snake and Columbia that swallow the current of a free-flowing river, turning it to lifeless slack water, wild and horny fish no longer swim thousands of miles on pure instinct to do one thing: sustain life. If water is the blood in the vessels of the land, salmon are surely the oxygen.

This museum survived on fluke. Its remoteness, a cataclysmic wildfire in 1910, and the Second World War all contributed to keeping the Salmon off the grid. The fire discouraged logging, and the war halted CCC road building crews working on the east and west ends of the canyon.

It would still be decades before people valued the Salmon because it remained untouched by industrial hands, and Lowbagger river guides like myself would start to ride these rivers in the ancient tradition: with a light foot and on the terms of the land. You have time to think about this stuff when you’re only 18 miles into a 80-mile run and it’s summertime in the northern Rockies. For three months the sun shines, water is liquid, and creatures stir. One must take advantage of such perks when editing a low-budget news source like Lowbagger.

I’ve always said that living outside in the Rockies is more precious than gold. And this is why we must be so hard line with the position that enough is enough when it comes to making a dirty dollar off of the jewels of this land. It seems cliché, and I wish it was.

Josh Mahan has been tracing the path of the off-road Lowbagger in the name of research and science since the sun returned to Montana.