Sitting shotgun in a beat-up Ford pickup, I’m wondering if I’ve dressed appropriately. I’m wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and a pair of boots. I’ve made a point this morning of leaving my sandals and synthetic-fiber fleece at home.
    It’s April 19, 2000, and the newspaper’s photographer and I are making a pilgrimage to the East Fork of the Salmon River Valley to talk with ranchers about wolves that have been slaying cattle on their spreads. We’ve paid attention to what we’re wearing because we want to give a good first impression. That is, we don’t want to look like we’re from Sun Valley. We don’t want to look like ourselves.
    We drift through Stanley at the north end of the Sawtooth Valley and twist into the Salmon River canyon, passing places like Indian Riffle and Torrey’s Hole where chinook salmon return from the Pacific Ocean to spawn each fall. Clusters of red willow stems flush with spring sap nestle along the riverbank. There’s spotty snow in the trees, crowded stands of lodgepole pine that give way to Douglas fir as we descend. A herd of elk browse in a sunny meadow across the river, a bald eagle is perched in a riverside snag.
    The canyon walls are steep, the mountains concealing most of the sky from view, and as we continue to descend the timber gives way to big angled sweeps of pastel-colored rock and sagebrush. After some miles of serpentine meanders the truck drifts into the diminutive riverside hamlet of Clayton, where a mule deer scampers across the empty highway.
    After passing through Clayton the canyon walls begin to yawn, revealing the true depth and expanse of the great Western sky. We cross a bridge and turn south onto a narrow strip of asphalt. Irrigated fields line the road, and cows browse in the grass. Sagebrush-covered hills rise from the valley. The sun is crawling toward mid-morning.
    After a half-hour we arrive at a roadside ranch house. Easing into the driveway the truck comes to rest. A flannel-clad man rumbles up on a four-wheeler. “I’m Eddie Junior,” he says. “Don’t ever call my dad again. He’s old and doesn’t need bothered with this stuff.”
    Gray wolves were deposited in Idaho in 1997 and 1998 as part of a federal reintroduction program that also reintroduced the native predators to Yellowstone National Park, and they've flourished. It’s clear that Eddie Baker Junior and his father, Eddie Baker, aren’t thrilled.
    We walk into the nine-hundred-acre ranch behind the house and arrive at the edge of the East Fork of the Salmon River, which is small and trickling. Junior points across the stream and describes an encounter from the previous winter. He’d been riding horseback and performing a routine check on some of the ranch’s two hundred and fifty cattle. As he sauntered through the snow among bawling cows and steers a gnawed piece of meat became apparent. One of his cows.
    “I looked right across the river, and I saw the wolves was there,” he says. “Big wolves. Pretty to look at.”
    But not for a rancher scrambling to protect his herd. Junior is a fifth generation East Fork cattle rancher, and he doesn’t want to let the only way of life he knows to slip through his fingers. Federally protected wolves, among a myriad of additional outside pressures, are a threat to that way of life.
    “I’ve got a boy in sixth grade,” he says. “And there’s no future in this for him. The market’s tough enough, but it’s all these outside restrictions: range rights, water, government restrictions and environmentalists. The banker is the least of the restrictions.”
    In the name of clean water, clean land and clean air the government is pushing ranchers off the land. Junior compares wolves to salmon and bull trout, which along with wolves are also listed as endangered species. “They’re a lever to get cattle off the land,” he says. “This has been cow country for years and years. I’d like to keep running cattle in the hills. We’re just doing our job, and we’ve got every environmentalist in the Northwest finding something wrong out here.”
    Later, the beat-up Ford rumbles back into Clayton where we continue to uncover discontent.
    “All our lives we visualize the West and cowboys, and then we turn around and try to do away with it,” says Steve Wright, who owns an antique store with his wife. They moved here from New York five years ago. “What we came here to be a part of is being taken away from us.”
    Across the highway is the Rocky Ridge Café and another distressed Clayton resident.
    “It’s really aggravating,” says clerk Julie Faust. “We shouldn’t have to put up with this. Who are they to tell us how we should live in our own backyards? There’s a reason why we got rid of wolves in the first place. Humans and wolves don’t mix. It’s not right that people should lose some of their living for a wild animal to gain.”
    A cartoon hangs on a bulletin board near the Rocky Ridge Café’s entrance. It’s barely visible over Faust’s shoulder. It depicts a woman burying a wheelbarrow full of dead wolves. “Transplanting wolves,” it reads.

    In the massive expanse of the American West, many a stereotype holds true. The people are as rugged as the tumbling mountains and rivers. The livings they carve are as difficult as the arid climate that shapes their lives. The culture is a stew of frontier-bred attitudes blended with the economic realities of an increasingly global society. It’s a culture mixed in the cauldron of a landscape. The land, in short, has shaped its inhabitants, and those inhabitants have shaped the land.
    Along the meandering goosenecks of the Salmon River between the towns of Challis and Stanley, there’s a remote mountain valley not often visited by people who don’t live there. Just east of the tiny hamlet of Clayton, the East Fork of the Salmon River joins her larger sibling, the main Salmon River. The confluence is a threshold few people have crossed. It is remote country, and it’s serviced by country that’s in the middle of nowhwere already.
    Following the East Fork upstream, the lowland sagebrush hills and riverside meadows gradually transform into rugged, conifer-covered ridges. To the east, more than 200,000 acres of lowland, road-free ridges spread to the horizon. To the west, the towering White Cloud Mountains scrape the unmistakable blue of the great western sky. Farther south, the 11,000-foot crags of the Boulder Mountains create a divide between this rural, agrarian place and the wealthy resort kingdom of Sun Valley, a world-renowned ski resort and home to some of wealthiest people in the American West.
    The name Baker is synonymous with the East Fork of the Salmon River Valley. The East Fork, which once teemed with thousands of spawning chinook salmon each summer, was settled by Bakers and molded by Bakers. The signature of the Bakers is indelible. It is part of the place’s past and present. The upper valley is threaded by Baker Creek. Baker Peak stands sentinel over the eastern foothills. Three ranches on the valley floor are owned by Bakers. The descendants of the original Bakers live there still and run cattle in the surrounding mountains, where their families have ranched for more than a century. In the spring, black angus and herefords speckle the lowland meadows surrounding the gently tumbling river, and the solitude of an early-morning mist is broken only by the bawling of calves or the howl of an unwelcome wolf.
    “My husband’s family, my brother-in-law and his father know every inch of this country,” says Melodie Baker, a former Custer County Commissioner and 20-year East Fork rancher. “We love it. We care for it. We want to see it continue in the same kind of operation, the same way of life, and the style that it has always been . . . It’s about the way we should be raising our kids and everything. That’s what makes this place so special.”
    As the eagle flies, Sun Valley and the prosperous communities surrounding it are 60 miles to the south, but they might as well be 500 miles away. The Big Wood River threads the Wood River Valley and drains the southern and western flanks of the Boulder Mountains. The area has roots in mining and agriculture, but it was white gold that precipitated the metamorphosis of the place in 1936 when Averill Harriman, the Union Pacific Railroad tycoon, built the nation’s first destination ski resort. Sun Valley became a magnet for the rich and famous, and through the ensuing seventy years, became an enclave for some of the nation’s wealthiest people.
    Blaine County, Sun Valley’s home county, is more than wealthy. It is also the most liberal of Idaho’s jurisdictions. Custer County, home to Clayton and the East Fork, is one of the state’s most conservative. If Custer County is hard, Blaine County is soft. If Custer County is tall, Blaine County is short. The only thing connecting them, indeed the only thing dividing them, is an expanse of towering mountains. The Boulder and White Cloud mountains have become a figurative war zone, a place where cultures and values collide. For more than three decades, conflict has dominated, and attempts at resolution have failed.
    Melodie Baker’s children are the sixth generation of the Baker family to ranch on the East Fork. It’s a place that’s got a certain kind of soul that’s hard to find elsewhere.
    “I was here long enough to realize that there’s so much more here than just the people and hard work: what I call a barn-raising type of atmosphere. Everybody helps everybody out. They will drop everything at a moment’s notice. You have fun times in here when you’re branding cattle. All the neighbors bring food, get together and help each other—same thing with shipping. I really appreciated that. I liked the fact that you felt quite safe here. There are problems like there are everywhere, but it’s on a smaller scale. Families are close. Friends are close. This is a great place to have family and raise kids.”
    Melodie Baker believes that the various parties with stakes in the nearby Boulder-White Clouds can work together to make things work. Like the barn-raising atmosphere the ranchers in the East Fork embrace, cooperation and commitment can go a long way.
    “There is enough country up here. There are places that you can’t take motorized vehicles, and there’s places that you can’t get a horse up into. But there are places that you can, and you should be able to. We have friends that, for health reasons, can’t walk into that country. Why should they be denied being able to go see that? It doesn’t have to be destructive. I do agree, we all do, I think, all the ranchers I’ve ever talked to, that the motorized end of it needs to be controlled and monitored, but so does people-use. One of the areas that they are looking at (in Simpson’s wilderness package) is the Frog Lake area up in the White Clouds. It’s beautiful. But even in the 20 years since I’ve been here, we went back up there a couple of years ago, I couldn’t believe the change. It wasn’t from the motorcycles or the ATVs or the cattle. It was people use, the impact there. That’s one thing we’ve been concerned about, all of the discussion on changing over just to recreation. That won’t be a total solution because if that’s not managed, you will have the same problems you will have without managing cattle, logging, mining or anything else. You can work all of them together. We’ve tried to show different ways that you can do and map out those kinds of areas, and show just how much country there is up there that can be accessible to everybody.”
    But Melodie Baker isn’t necessarily in favor of proposed ranching buyout provisions that Simpson pulled from his bill when opposition mounted in the early legislative hearings.
    “People seem to think that if there is enough money they will take it and run. People wouldn’t be here for six generations if they were in it for the money. They love this country, and it’s part of them. For most of them, it wouldn’t matter how much money you gave them. They don’t want to leave. This is their home. My husband’s family, my brother-in-law and his father, know every inch of this country. The idea that they can’t go out of here in this country would kill them. It’s not about the money. It’s about the land. We love it. We care for it. We want to see it continue in same kind of operation, the same way of life, and the style that it has always been. To me, that’s what it is about. It’s not about money. It’s about the way we should be raising our kids and everything. That’s what makes this place so special.”
    Sid Dowton speaks with a distinct western drawl from beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat. He owns a spread just down the road from Melodie and her husband, Wayne Baker. Dowton was born and raised in the East Fork and graduated from Challis High School. He sees an uncertain future for ranching there.
    “I believe we either have to stabilize ranching or sell conservation easements on our property. If we can’t do those two, we have to subdivide. I’ve been in the ranching business all of my life. I’ve put all of my life savings into ranching, and I’ve got (to) retire. I’m getting 62 years old and can’t continue to do it. I would like to stay in the ranching business. With the controversies with the fish and the wolves and the recreation, it’s more difficult. I hope that we can stay in the ranching industry. I hope that we could find a balance so that we could get what everyone wants from this beautiful country up here. But I don’t see that happening. Maybe with the proposed wilderness up here, ranching will become that much harder. I think that we have to maybe look at the conservation easements. If that doesn’t come through and I can’t run my cattle up here, then I only have one alternative: to break my property into small ranchettes, subdivide. It has a big value to that. We are not far from the Ketchum and Stanley basin area where property values are very high, and we think we have everything to offer that they have.”
    But he doesn’t want to see it subdivided. It’s a place he’s known his whole life and to see it broken into trophy homes or second homes would break his heart.
    “I certainly wouldn’t,” he said. “I don’t think the river would be the same or the game would be the same. We’re under a lot of pressure, and trying to make a living today is pretty tough. I have two children in my operation. Neither one of them are very interested in trying to run cattle on public grazing. They can see the handwriting on the wall. I think that my wife, Keren, and I are committed to the land. We just hate to give up on it because of our lifestyle. We may not win this battle. I really don’t think we will. I hope we could.”
    Solutions aren’t easy, and Dowton appears to have thrown in his big black hat.
    “I have been trying to work with the various conservation groups for years, and trying to work with the SNRA people, government people. (There) are too many driving forces to eliminate ranching on the East Fork, and maybe even eliminate ranching here in the West. It’s highly public ground here in the West. People think that with public ground, public ownership, they all have a piece of the action. They all have a say what should happen, and I don’t have anything against that. I just don’t see a way that we’re going to solve all of the issues that are on the table and for me to stay in the cow business and run out here on public lands.”
 
    No, destroying hope entirely doesn't make sense. Life is long, and anything can happen. But somehow it is still living within me, and I have to rid myself of it. I have to hope that hope will wither and somehow fade. I have to hope that hope will not grow as long as there is love to begin with. Because as hard as I've tried, hope lives on inside me.
    I delete all of the words from my life, her words for me, and the manuscript I began for us. One after the other, I delete the chapters and stories until I encounter the story titled "Power of a River." It is Marie's tale, the story of how she'd been hiking with her husband in Colorado's Collegiate Peaks and how she'd likened life to climbing a mountain. The story doesn't have a direct bearing on Araxie and me. In fact, the seed of it germinated long before I met her. But its meaning is poignant and as true in any life situation as it had been for the two of us.
    Life is like climbing a mountain, one step in front of the other with faith in our hearts that there is a summit up there somewhere. And water does carve stone, the same massive monoliths that draw down snows, which feed the river to begin with. And, yes, rivers do eventually flow away from the mountains they carve.
    It is, after all, who we were. I was Aaron, the mountain that refreshed her flow. She was Araxie, the river that inspired poetic vision.
    Power of a river indeed.