Hells Canyon (April 1977 | Volume: 28, Issue: 3)

Hells Canyon

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Authors: William Ashworth

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April 1977 | Volume 28, Issue 3

Hells Canyon is awesome. There is no other single word that can adequately describe it. Incredibly deep, austerely magnificent, it slashes between the states of Oregon and Idaho like a raw and gaping wound. To stand on the rim and gaze into that vast hole is to know humility as few places can teach it; to venture into it is to enter a place apart, a separate world-within-a-world where the old scales and comfortable concepts of size and distance fade into irrelevancy. “The grandeur and originality of the views presented on every side,” wrote Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, one of the canyon’s earliest explorers, “beggar both the pencil and the pen. Nothing we had ever gazed upon in any other region could for a moment compare in wild majesty and impressive sternness with the series of scenes which here at every turn astonished our senses and filled us with awe and delight.” Little seems changed since Bonneville’s time, nearly a century and a half ago. Though whole towns have lived and died in those scorched depths, though mines have been punched through the walls, though the white river has known all types of craft from canoes and rubber rafts to stern-wheelers and jet boats, so much space is caught between those beetling rims, so much emptiness and sheer, overwhelming size, that it is still easy to repeat the experience of the old woodsman quoted in Life magazine in the summer of 1969: “I spent three weeks in there once. Didn’t see a soul. Do you understand? Didn’t see a soul.”

Hells Canyon of the Snake River, as the Oregon Board of Geographic Names has officially defined it since 1970, begins at a natural feature called the Oxbow near the tiny hamlet of Homestead, Oregon. For most of its 104-mile length downstream to the mouth of the Grande Ronde River the canyon’s course is slightly east of north. But about two thirds of the way along, it bends to the left and from that point down it runs generally north-northwest. This lower portion, which includes the mouths of the Salmon and Imnaha rivers, is spectacular enough; but it is the upper section, from the great bend southward, that has given the gorge its awe-inspiring reputation. It is here, between dark brooding walls as little as five miles apart at the top, that the most profound depths are found. How deep? Six Empire State Buildings; four Yellowstone Canyons; nearly two Yosemite Valleys; 47 Niagara Falls. From He Devil Peak on the east rim to the surface of the Snake the drop is 7,900 feet, more than a third of a mile greater than the maximum 6,ioo-foot depth of the Grand Canyon at Point Imperial. The lower west rim is still more than a mile high. The late Richard Neuberger once pointed out that you could drop the entire Catskill Range into the canyon and still come fifteen hundred feet short of filling it. How deep? The