Kamiah, ID 8-13-07

We had a very quiet night in our field. When we got up, the smoke from the nearest fires was laying on the mountain tops. We hit the road after toast this morning around 9:30. We drove north on highway 95. The most surprising thing about Idaho to us is these brown, treeless mountains. We had pictured unending forests which is not true as you can see by these pictures. The rivers are gorgeous, so big, wide and fast moving.

When we crossed the Salmon River at White Bird we passed back into Pacific time, a surprise because it seems odd that the northern panhandle of Idaho is a different time zone than the southern/major part of the state. Most of these pictures have smoke in the sky from the forest fires. The smoke became worse as we came north.

At Grangeville we got off of 95 and picked up highway 13 to highway 12. As soon as we got off of 95 we started climbing and ended up in forest and descended quite a steep grade and when we got to the bottom we stopped and had breakfast beside a branch of the Clearwater River and we followed it up to Kamiah where we are staying the next two nights. We traveled about 123 miles today and are staying in a Passport America park, but for us to get satellite we are right alongside the highway…at least it isn’t a very busy highway. It is pretty smoky here and there has been a new start just over the hill on the Indian Reservation.

After we got settled we drove into Kamiah and fueled up the truck and while we were sitting there while the truck was guzzling we saw smoke up in town…a brush fire. The local department sounded off while we were at the post office picking up our mail. We went up to scope it out and the local department wasn’t doing very well. There is a Forest Service Station in town and soon we saw a unit from New Mexico show up, we’ll find out tomorrow if they saved the town. We found Kamiah city park right on the river and it had 5 RV sites with water and electric for 5 bucks and we could have stayed there for two nights. Oh well, where we are isn’t so bad. Eleven dollars a night for full hook-ups and there is a laundry so we can do that too if we need to.

Oh, Idaho’s sales tax is six percent and they tax everything! Food, camping sites, fuel, everything!