A guide struggles to be heard over sloshing waves. Plastic paddles clank against each other. Repeated attempts to get guests on the boat to paddle in sync, four paddle strokes forward, fail. A little boy in the front of the boat is so small and he is so cold that he has stopped paddling altogether. It is a gloomy and cold June day for a rafting trip, but the boats have launched anyway. A busload of tourists, bundled in dry tops and wetsuits, are now bobbing down the river at the mercy of their 20-something-year-old guides.
Catapulting toward waves is a raft guide’s forte, pivoting a boat full of inexperienced tourists to water that provides safe excitement and away from foreboding rocks. It helps that these guides know this stretch of river practically by heart. They know which rapids hurt, too—which ones flip boats and break bones. Where the salmon swim. They’ve learned to keep overbearing tourists safe and in the boat. They know that knowing a river is deceiving and that upon returning home (a Subaru with a bed in the back, parked in the guiding company's parking lot) their minds will be full of the adrenaline of the day and an insatiable urge to understand every current more intimately.
On the edge of the Sawtooth Mountain range, life revolves around the Salmon River, and residents dance in the streets. Here in Idaho, between Salmon and Boise, homestead-style cabins mix with new vacation homes. River runners, cowboys, and felted-hat families all call this valley paradise.
Stanley, Idaho—population 116—swells in the summer with the arrival of tanned, fit seasonal workers. Gossip spreads rapidly, and names like Snake, Cassanova Jack, and Handy float in the air, along with the lore of the town’s last cowboy-style gunfight, in 1979. Like most towns in the American West, Stanley is undergoing a shift. While it’s maybe less visible here than in other mountain towns, wealth is changing the landscape. The river runners, including the beloved raft guides who make the town what it is, remain steadfast, consistent. They’re driven by necessity to work long days and then sleep in their cars, all in a place they deeply love but are increasingly unable to afford.
Without them, Stanley’s haunts would likely shutter, reliant on both their labor and business to keep afloat. The river runners need Stanley and Stanley needs the river runners, but a squeezed real estate market and rising costs make the relationships harder to maintain. Raft guides return blistered, bruised, and sunburnt after days on the river, only to lie in the backseats of their cars for a night’s rest. Drawn back year after year by the constant adrenaline-rush-and-comedown cycle of working in a dangerous and unpredictable medium—the river—guides are the lynchpin of Stanley, but consistently vulnerable. Protected wilderness and public lands keep some real estate development at bay, but mansions continue to rise while affordable housing stagnates. It’s a natural Eden, but residents and river runners fret about who will get to call Stanley, Idaho, home in the future.
“Stanley lives and dies by summertime,” says Mark Martin, a river runner who’s been in and out of Stanley for 18 years.
When Martin first came to Stanley, in 2005, he had driven from Maine on a whim. His friend had said he could get him a job on the river. On his first day, Martin’s raft flipped and he was thrown out into the water, taking a gnarly swim through a class-four rapid. (River rapids are ranked on a scale from one to five, making a class-four rapid an advanced run due its unpredictability and large, wild waves).
“I was sitting there on the shore just kinda coughing up river, and I thought this might not actually be for me,” says Martin. “I had no other options, actually. The thing was, I had moved 3,000 miles, and a couple days later the transmission locked up in my car.”
Martin had ended up stranded at the gateway to one of the most remote wilderness areas in the United States. Stanley was once slated to be the entrance point for an Idaho national park project in the 1960s. Instead, the area remains a quilt-pattern of public Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands and privately owned properties. The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness is the largest contiguous wilderness area in the lower 48, with the Salmon River being one of the best ways to access the complete solitude that the region has to offer.
Stanley is where recreationists coming from the Idaho towns of Ketchum, Sun Valley, and Boise—and from around the world—aim to experience a world shaped by the river. Martin estimates the miniscule year-round population swells by a few thousand people in the summer. The swell is one part seasonal river raft guides, another part tourists, and a small part folks with vacation homes summering beneath the Sawtooths. As the mountain snowmelt builds Salmon’s rivers, so too do river runners build the town.
“It's too idyllic to even really exist, but it does,” says Martin.
It is this guise of perfection that draws people in. The summer is also when nearly everyone in town makes the majority of their money, before winter pushes seasonal workers out. A guide might make $150-$200 a day on a multi-day trip, but the hours are physically and mentally grueling, and living expenses are high in Stanley. The nearest large grocery store is a two-hour drive away, and the local stores (one is a gas station) have steep markups and limited selection. Guides often carpool to the farther-away grocery store, shopping together to buy in bulk and reduce prices. Rental apartments or houses are, guides say, effectively nonexistent. And the rising price of real estate in town means that outfitters can no longer afford to provide employee housing.
The instability of seasonal life compounds these costs. When the summer ends, most guides have to move out of Stanley completely and live in other pricey resort towns to work seasonal jobs. Finding affordable healthcare with this type of job structure is its own gauntlet. Yet without river running, Stanley would run dry.
To understand Stanley, you have to understand the Salmon River.
“I can't think of one guy that is not touched by the body of water they work on,” says Dave Denning, owner and operator of Stanley’s The River Company, which takes patrons on a stretch of the Salmon for morning and afternoon trips, with rafters returning to town in time for mid-afternoon or evening beers. Some guests opt for a longer, multi-day river trip. Stanley is a central logistics point for a gaggle of companies running guided river trips along the Middle Fork and Main Salmon Rivers, both five- to six-day wilderness stretches. The Upper Salmon, which offers a day-stretch run with a section of class-four rapids, is accessible from Stanley as well.
“I can’t think of one guy that is not touched by the body of water they work on.”
Along the Salmon, such rapids are so powerful that guides are often spit out into the rapids themselves, clambering back onto the boat with the help of strong guests or a secondary raft. One rapid at the Sunbeam Dam is known to regularly flip rafts; the confluence scatters rafters like confetti and has exposed guests and private boaters alike to the icy waters. It’s rare, but these flips have resulted in deaths and serious injuries.
The Middle Fork, more technically difficult to raft than the Main Salmon, is known for its whitewater and hot springs. The Main Salmon has campsites along sprawling beaches. Homesteaders dot the banks of the Main, with one couple subsisting on hunted elk and avocados (delivered by the raft guides) plus produce from their expansive garden. Both stretches have pictographs left by Bitterroot Culture, ancestors to the Northern Shoshone native people. The river is extremely remote, without cell service or easy evacuation points.
The multi-day trips on the Main and Middle Fork are unique for their constant and uninterrupted solitude. There is, according to the guides, almost nothing else like it in the United States, except for perhaps the Grand Canyon or areas of Alaska. The loss of contact with the outside world influences how guides and guests interact.
“I just don't know of any other arena where so many different people from so many different places come together for this one really simple common purpose, which is to have fun and travel in such a compelling manner along the wild river with no roads and no civilization for a hundred miles,” says Martin. “Incredibly deep connections get made, and that's one of the biggest reasons that I'm still around and still doing it. … I'm also just kind of hooked on living out there.”
It is a slow rhythm and one that draws crews together tightly as well. “It's such a unique way of getting to know someone, because you're living and working with them really super intensely for six days,” says Kat Seesel, who guided on the Main Salmon out of Stanley in 2021 and 2022. “Nobody should be spending this much time with each other, because you sleep next to each other, and then cook together, and then pick up and do it all again for six days in a row, and then go back to your car and exist in Stanley, Idaho. So it's unlike any relationships I've ever made before in a lot of ways.”
“Nobody should be spending this much time with each other, because you sleep next to each other, and then cook together, and then pick up and do it all again for six days in a row, and then go back to your car and exist in Stanley, Idaho.”
Despite the appeal of a life on the water and the airbrushed version of Western life currently pervading pop culture, this frontier isn’t flawless. Guides are responsible for the safety and enjoyment of their guests in an environment that is inherently risk-prone. One guide saw a guest drown on the river, pinned under a log while the guest’s family and the guide could do nothing to save them. No danger can be mitigated completely, but it is the guides’ job to ensure safety while keeping guests entertained and pleased. Male and female river runners mention deeply ingrained toxic masculinity. Others talked about popping nightly Advils to keep the aches away. Some recalled the pain of getting pulled belly first down the riverbank, trying to catch and stop a heavy boat from running away with the river’s current.
“It’s not a perfect fairy world,” says Denning.
The days are long. From a dawn wakeup to repacking the kitchen box at 11 p.m., guides often work 16-hour-plus days, with just two days between near-weeklong trips. Given the necessary preparations between trips, guides usually only have about a day off. That’s one day to relax, do their laundry, pay the bills, see friends, and for some guides, drive almost three hours to Boise to hug family members and then drive back. If a guide gets injured, they have to see the doctor in those 24 hours or be out of work for a week or more. The cycle continues for the entire summer: 10-12 weeks straight.
“I saw a fellow guide pull his own tooth out on a Middle Fork trip once,” says Shannon Walton. Walton is the executive director of the Redside Foundation, a nonprofit that looks after the health and strength of the professional outdoor guiding community. The off-the-cuff dental procedure might have resulted from a lack of time or money, pure convenience, or bravado. It’s probably a mix of all four. Whatever the reason, it speaks to a culture of grit and the ability—and pressure—to work through pain.
The Redside Foundation was founded in honor of Telly Evans, a longtime Middle Fork guide who died by suicide in 2010. The foundation helps people navigate the pitfalls of paradise.
“Guiding is a dream job, but it's also a very, very difficult thing to take on as your life,” says Walton. “If you're guiding year-round, you're moving from season to season and place to place and community to community. If you're just guiding in the summer, you're diving head-first into your summer guiding community, leaving everyone else behind. Living on other people's vacations sounds great, but it's pretty lonely.”
“Guiding is a dream job, but it’s also a very, very difficult thing to take on as your life. If you’re guiding year-round, you’re moving from season to season and place to place and community to community … Living on other people’s vacations sounds great, but it’s pretty lonely.”
The end of summer brings an end to certain stressors, but it can feel abrupt. While difficult, living by the river’s rhythms brings a constant sense of purpose, adrenaline, and community for many. It is hard to replicate the thrill of navigating a complex rapid or of camping every night on a beach beneath pristine stars.
“The transition is hard at times, because you just feel so full and then all of a sudden you switch into a whole different rhythm,” says Sophie Nasvik, who has guided with White Otter Outdoor Adventures in nearby Sunbeam, Idaho, for the last three seasons.
Walton says that it almost always comes down to “loneliness or isolation” when folks reach out to the Redside Foundation. Blending back into a nine-to-five job or returning to daily life is a shock at the end of the summer, as is the relentless pace of guiding during the season. The foundation provided 2,000 individual, free counseling sessions to guides in need in 2022. “Somehow you have to strike that balance between working hard and taking enough time off to maintain your physical and mental health and your relationships and your financial wellbeing,” says Martin.
Despite the hardships, it rings true that unshakable bonds can, and do, form within the guiding community in Stanley. The loneliness and simultaneous deep connection feel contradictory.
Nasvik describes White Otter as “the most solid community I have ever found in life.”
If you guide on the river, you will always be part of that place. “I haven't worked as a guide for about 17 years now, or 18 years, and I'm still called a guide,” says Walton.
“During the years that I guided … I always felt more comfortable on the river in the summer than I did in town,” says Jerry Hughes of Hughes River Expeditions. “I felt totally at ease and totally comfortable on the river.”
Hughes and Carole Finley, both in their 70s now, have been running Hughes River Expeditions since 1976. He first ran the Middle Fork in 1963 with the Boy Scouts. In 1967, Hughes was trained by and worked with the famous Hatch Family of Hatch River Expeditions. (Bus Hatch led the first commercial rafting trip in the United States, in the early 1930s). The Hatch family would take the Kennedy Family down the Middle Fork in 1966, ushering in a whole new popularity for the sport. Hughes was on the catapulting end of the river craze.
In the 1970s, the Forest Service began issuing limited permits for the river. People started to speculate on their value and bought them up, priced at $25 apiece. Today, permits are hard to come by. To get access to permits commercially, a person has to buy an entire river business—boats, email lists, and all. The permit is considered an asset. When guided, six-day river trips cost roughly $1,500-$3,500 per person, and 24 guests can fill a trip, those permits are precious.
But besides the economics of it, Stanley was and is a vortex of intersecting, albeit mostly white, identities. Many find river running later in their working lives.
“There are a lot of masters degrees out there,” says Martin. Early on, Hughes remembers paddling and hauling boats with oil field workers. Nasvik describes the influx in the summers of a lot of “liberal young white kids.” Off season, you’ll find guides who switch back to life as a school teacher or ski guide, or are involved with environmental advocacy, or travel overseas to guide elsewhere. One local business manager recently returned to the area after 10 years of touring with a metal band. Stanley doesn’t seem to give a damn about what you do. Just get on the river. Dance.
The early days of river running in Stanley was the era of the Stanley Stomp. The stomp was an all-out weekend dance party full of music in the town’s numerous bars, restaurants, and iconic dance hall. This was the lawless era of Stanley, where locals, according to Hughes, would handcuff hooligans around telephone poles until law enforcement—usually a county sheriff—could handle them.
Over time, the dance hall in Stanley moved. It’s now part of a small but influential hotel in town called Mountain Village. But once upon a time the Plywood Palace—which eventually went up in the flames—was the go-to spot. Today, the Kasino Club and Mountain Village host folk bands, along with mellow idyllic nights at the historic Sawtooth Inn.
On Thursday nights in the summer, Ace of Diamonds Boulevard still buzzes into a swing-dancing mass of cowboys and river runners, as the Sawtooths watercolor the background. Chacos and well-worn cowboy boots scuffle in and out of the town’s most beloved bar—the Kasino Club—like clockwork, gathering outside at picnic tables as music filters from a small stage on the main street.
As the sun gets lower on the horizon, the dancing begins, with dogs and children darting between legs, bodies spinning and dipping to thrumming tunes. The tradition, called Street Dance, is a staple of Stanley life.
“It doesn’t matter what other people are thinking about you or how silly or not silly you may look, everyone’s just literally dancing in the dust.”
“Street dances feel like people are just dancing in the dust, having a good time,” says Seesel. “It doesn't matter what other people are thinking about you or how silly or not silly you may look, everyone's just literally dancing in the dust.”
Despite some of the fame and fortune that cycles through town—monied residents of Montana’s Yellowstone Club (where a membership deposit costs multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars), politicians, and singers and songwriters looking for inspiration—life in Stanley still revolves around a select few inns and motels, campgrounds, and a grocery store.
“The priority has never really been about living high on the hog,” says Walton. “Stanley has always been about living with a really beautiful landscape and looking after your neighbor.”
Year-round residents of Stanley are a small bunch who brave some of the coldest winter temperatures in the United States. The average low temperature in January is -2 degrees Fahrenheit, with monthly snowfall of 13 inches. But this is subject to change: The weather is erratic and nature rules. Even July can bring a chance of snow.
Despite what locals maintain in their spirit, there is no doubt that Stanley is changing.
“There used to be a lot more outfitters here, but as Stanley's got more expensive … a lot of them are going to Salmon [Idaho] just because they can't afford to operate here,” says Denning. In town, you’re bound to notice real estate signs. Some acknowledge that the boom in ultra-wealthy residents in nearby Ketchum and Sun Valley is bound to impact Stanley (and likely already has).
Low-income people have already been priced out of the resort town of Sun Valley, in a cycle that has increasingly favored wealthier and wealthier individuals, squeezing middle-class residents out too. People say that eventually the “billionaires are gonna kick out the millionaires,” says Nasvik.
But the harsh winters, combined with strict land codes and allotments in Stanley, on top of extensive public lands surrounding the town, make large-scale development difficult. The school in town also only goes up to eighth grade, which usually forces families to move away. Despite these roadblocks, large homes still dot the landscape to most of the locals’ dismay.
“As with the expansion that's happening in a lot of the West, it's pretty wild to watch,” says Seesel. “People who have so much build another huge mansion overlooking the whole valley in just the most exhibitionist spot that you could possibly put it in. …That is definitely a point of tension.”
If a guide or seasonal worker wants to live in a room and not in their car or a camper, it’s nearly impossible. Crew quarters (housing provided by a rafting company or business) are few and far between. As is a trend around the country, staffing shortages have shut down businesses in Stanley. Real estate prices are driving businesses out, too.
Change is slow to happen in Stanley. Even that slow change may eventually come to favor the very wealthy or long-standing locals who bought their property decades ago, pricing out nearly everyone else. Yet everyone else is still critical to the outdoor industry, which gives the town its soul.
“I don't really know how that's going to work itself out, because there is so much public land that there's not really room for [Stanley] to grow—which I think is a net good thing, but also means that if people can buy it, then it means that the people who can't just don't have anywhere,” Seesel says.
For guides, making and building a life in Stanley has become more difficult. “I'll always guide some trips, but I'm at a bit of a crossroads,” says Martin. “Figuring out how to own a place in Stanley and live there year-round, these days that's not very realistic. But as far as the river community goes, honestly, that's where I see the most constancy.”
The area might be in flux, but the Salmon River, the dancing, the slowness of Stanley life, will continue to be a siren song. And while river running and guide culture has been a constant, it remains to be seen how a changing American West will squeeze or not squeeze the core businesses and workers out.
“If you had to dream a life for your summer, it's pretty dreamy,” says Denning.
For folks like the Hugheses, who have watched Stanley transform and morph before their eyes, the allure of running rivers will never leave.
“Waking up early before everybody else and cleaning the kitchen up and getting the coffee on, on the Middle Fork … It's just magic,” says Hughes. “You feel like you're in just the most amazing place in the world.”
Words + Photos by Claire Barber
