The river as recreation

Ira Stutzman traded his job as an Idaho Power Co. lineman for a chance to do what he loves - build custom fly fishing poles and run a houseboat in Hells Canyon. Every spare moment he can find, he fishes for bass in the continent's deepest gorge.

For anglers and outdoors enthusiasts, it's paradise

As teens while away the afternoon jumping into the slack water from boulders at the river's edge, the first six fall chinook of the year pass Lower Granite Dam.

We drive toward Idaho along the reservoir. Ahead is Lapwai, home of the Nez Perce Indians, the tribe that crossed the Snake River in Hells Canyon during their epic retreat from the Army in 1877.

A thick, dark cloud rises to the south of the "Jackpot frenzy" banner at the Clearwater River Casino. Ten minutes later, it's clear the tribal headquarters is in danger. An arc of orange flame is blowing down a cheatgrass hill toward the sprawling complex, which has been evacuated.

Tribal Chairman Samuel Penney cannot talk. Like thousands of others across the West, he is fighting fire.

Back to Lewiston.

This is where Lewis and Clark met the Snake in 1805 as they paddled down the Clearwater River and joined its larger cousin en route to the Columbia. The explorers' journey downstream from here was treacherous. It was only with "great exertion" that they were able to free their canoes from the many rocks and rapids that plagued them.

Unlike the gold miners and homesteaders who followed, the famed explorers did not go deep into the black basalt heart of Hells Canyon. But perhaps they would have if they'd asked Jennifer Blatchford of Baker City, Ore., for travel advice.

She would have told them to wait for nightfall, lie still in their canoes and look at the stars. "You will be sleeping on your boat at night and you will just hear this giant flop ... this big 'kerplunk.' And that's a carp.

"There is no better place on the Snake River when the fish are plunking."

HALFWAY, Ore. - If Ira Stutzman has heard one carp splash in the middle of the night, he's heard a million.

And if he's heard a million, he's caught thousands of fish where the Snake River winds through North America's deepest gorge.

Two years ago, Stutzman traded his life as an Idaho Power Co. lineman for a fledgling fly fishing pole business in this secret garden of the Snake.

Then he complicated things by buying a house boat - the only one in the canyon - to treat visitors to the unspoiled solitude he's known for years. Eventually, he envisions a lodge somewhere nearby on the Idaho-Oregon border.

Stutzman's career change was a good choice. His custom rods - which sell for about $350 to $2,200 - are selling three times faster than just a year ago. He and his family build a rod a day and are six months behind on orders.

"For years, I was in a business where people had to have what I have," said Stutzman, 48. "Now, it's something they want."

The same could be said for Idaho, a playground that is second to none in the West. It boasts more miles of rivers than any other state.

And those rivers draw tourist dollars by the millions. Only computer manufacturing and farming support more of the state's economy.

Some of those tourists find Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, which covers 650,000 acres of Idaho and Oregon and is surrounded by hundreds of thousands more acres of national forest.

It is perhaps the most remote place on the Snake, in part because there's only a few sickeningly twisting roads that provide access into a vault that is deeper than the Grand Canyon by roughly 2,000 feet.

Stutzman tells his story on the top deck of the Kimmy Ann, a 56-foot houseboat named after his daughter. The half-moon sheds the only light, save one electric bulb a mile downstream.

A few nights earlier, Ira and his wife, Sharon, made a late-night run to the houseboat. He'd been up since 2 a.m. building rods and he was complaining about the trip. "I have to go down to the houseboat again," he grumbled.

"Then we got down here and the moon was full and we were sitting here saying, 'People would kill to be able to do this.'

"I think we are very lucky."

A cricket concerto carries across the open water. Bats dart in night air, which wraps the canyon like a blanket. To either side of Stutzman, massive slabs of stone jut from the earth as high as 9,300 feet. Idaho is on the east, Oregon on the west. The rock shapes are discernible because they block the stars.

According to Nez Perce legend, Coyote excavated Hells Canyon with a stick to protect his ancestors from "Seven Devils" - the personified mountains to the east.

Waves lap at the houseboat, and every few minutes a 10- or 15-pound carp lifts itself out of the water and lands with a thwack!

"Just keep your eyes and ears open," Jennifer Blatchford, an Eastern Oregon tourism promoter, had said a week earlier. "It's my favorite place on earth."

When day breaks, the dark fish seem thick enough to walk across, like stones in a stream. And this is a stream, at least, when compared with the river at the end of the last Ice Age when its flows were 1,000 times greater than during modern spring freshets.

Despite its treacherous terrain, Hells Canyon was used as sheep and cattle range land by the end of the 19th century. About the same time, gold frenzy swept the region, bringing men - and a cargo ship captain named Haller.

In 1895, Haller's boat, the Norma, was commissioned to haul copper from mines near Stutzman's moorings.

Haller took just one treacherous trip - and legend has it that the name Hells Canyon stuck either because of his expletives or a slurring of his name.

Either way, the region holds singular environmental significance. It is the "hub of the wheel among the ... wild land complexes of the Pacific Northwest," according to the Hells Canyon Preservation Council.

"The genetic legacy of the Pacific Northwest courses through the Hells Canyon ecosystem like blood through a beating heart."

Cougar, bighorn sheep, bobcats, grizzlies and antelope move through its mountains every year. Nearly every species of wildlife in the Northwest can be found in the varied topography of the region.

The canyon also is prized for hydropower. Stutzman's former employer, Idaho Power, operates three large dams in the canyon - three dams that stop salmon from migrating farther upstream but supply electricity to a good chunk of Idaho.

The three dams also create a prodigious warm-water fishery for perch, crappie, bass, sturgeon, trout and, of course, carp.

But the smallmouth bass fishery behind Brownlee Dam, once considered among the best in the West, has been shattered by federal demands that Idaho water be sluiced down the Snake to flush endangered young salmon to the ocean.

The resulting unstable reservoir levels wreck bass spawning habitat - just one of many environmental tradeoffs being made along this river.

Carp also highlight the conflicting objectives of Western land management. They were introduced into the river at the end of the 1800s by Idaho farmers intending to create a new food crop, said Mark Fiege in an essay on Idaho's "hybrid landscape."

The carp flourished in drainage ditches and streams, eventually beating out other fish for resources and outliving large-scale attempts to kill them. "The fish became part of a hybrid environment over which humans exercised incomplete control," Fiege wrote in Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples.

Now, Stutzman is trying to make the most of the situation. Carp are considered a trash fish here but are popular enough with European anglers that he's trying to lure them to the Snake for vacations.

Of course, when he's casting about, Stutzman uses his signature poles.

His yellow fly line skips in flying "Zs" across the still water like a long string of spaghetti. His forearm moves like clockwork as the line follows forward and back. Ten o'clock. Two o'clock. Ten o'clock. Two o'clock. Bass strike every few casts.

In his hand is a glassy red-and-black mottled snakewood handle, one of his specialties. Or, more accurately, daughter Kim's specialty. She does much of the handle handiwork on a lathe at the family shop.

"It feels like I have accomplished something when I take something so ugly and make it into something so nice," said Kim, 22, while tending breakfast sausage simmering on the houseboat barbecue. "Every piece is so different. You never know what you are going to get when you start."

As she talks, a parade of raccoons, rabbits and deer come to the water's edge. Bighorn sheep, the prize animal of the canyon, stay well up in the hills despite the Stutzmans' salt lick.

Kim had an indirect hand in starting her dad's business.

In the early 1990s, his longtime hobby started to become something more when she asked for a spinning rod. Since she hates the feel of cork, Stutzman experimented with a wooden lathe-turned handle.

"I am one of those guys who likes to think up things to do," he said.

What he discovered is the poles had better balance with heavier butts. So he searched the world for the most interesting wood to decorate his poles.

Now, businessmen from New Jersey to South Africa daydream about wrapping their hand around one of Stutzman's creations. Ten o'clock. Two o'clock. Ten o'clock. Two o'clock.

Among Stutzman's customers are a prominent Hollywood funnyman and a former president whom he won't name for fear of betraying their confidence.

Stutzman said his is the only houseboat in the canyon - "Everybody in Halfway went, 'What is that?'" - but he's not the only game in the canyon when it comes to recreation. Several powerboat and raft companies in Lewiston and Clarkston offer day and week trips into the canyon for $50 to $900.

The majority of the canyon's recreation takes place below Hells Canyon Dam, a stretch of river designated wild and scenic by Congress 25 years ago to preserve "vestiges of primitive America."

Its rapids -the "big water" of the Snake - are world-class. Wild Sheep rapids, for instance has swallowed nearly 20 boats.

But there's much more to Stutzman's slice of paradise, such as rock art paintings left by American Indians, an abandoned homestead cabin and a man with a big boat and a perfectly balanced fly rod.

"It's amazing," Stutzman said, "how many people don't know what's here."