Backpacking as a Boy in Idaho

Growing up my dad and I would go on weekend backpacking trips to high mountain lakes. I don't remember using trails much; I think we mostly went cross-country. And the maps we used were the sketches is a book titled "High Lakes of Idaho" (I think). It was published by the Idaho Fish and Game Department (I think), and was good for the relative position and size of lakes, and information about their (supposed) trout populations. By today's standards, as maps, they would be considered cartoons. But back then they were our reality.

With this kind of resource we headed for Smith Lake in the Trinity Mountains of Central Idaho. The map suggested we take a trail for part of the way, and then it looked like we would head out along some ridge, and find the lake, supposedly sporting Rainbow Trout.

We took the trail, and the ridge, but after a while it must have been the wrong ridge, as there was no lake. But to the north, nestled under another ridge, on the other side of a deep canyon, looked like a basin that could hold the lake we were looking for.

So we crossed the canyon in between. The plants at the bottom of the canyon were such that I had never seen before. When we touched them - the seed pods exploded. Wow! I suppose there is a name for such. Cool.

We climbed up toward the basin and found the lake. Coming to its shore we found a dead trout in the water next to the bank. Good news - the lake we found has fish, or at least did. And the fish was the most remarkable creature I had ever seen. It must have just died, because it still had all it's color. A trout, with dark green back with black spots, green golden sides, and then a pink rainbow stripe, as bright as international pink flagging, a quarter inch wide, `painted' mid-height down the full length of the fish. Beautiful, even though dead.

We went on that weekend to catch live specimens of the same such fish. A coloration of trout I will never forget, and have never since seen matched.

At night we lay under the stars. In summer, in the mountains of Southern Idaho, it never rained, or it never rained on us. That night there was some lighting and thunder, and probably a few raindrops on the ridge that we had first wandered on, but not on us. And so it was with all the backpacking trips with my dad. We never took a tent, because it never rained. Only when I went off to college and became more `educated' that I thought we should take a tent on such, and we did, and then it rained, right in the middle of summer, like all that non-rain of childhood accumulated and now let loose.

We returned to Smith Lake in later years. Each trip had its own fascinations, and each year we caught fish. But never again did the fish have that beauty of that first year.