The Show That Almost Ended It
(pretty close)

There was one show in the mid-1980s that almost caused us to throw in the towel. It happened in central Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains.

In those days we drove an old, beat-up, noisy station wagon that could barely make it up a respectable mountain road without wheezing. It was affectionately known as Dooder.

Writer-Producer Royce Williams from Idaho’s Fish & Game Department and Videographer Jeff Tucker from Idaho Public Television and a wheezing Dooder made it to Stanley one warm day in June of 1987, climbing over Galena Summit and dropping into the Sawtooth valley. 

The guys planned to then drive another hour to the turn-off for the Slate Creek dirt road on the way to Challis. At the end of the road is the trail to Crater Lake, guarded by a mining company and a huge slash pile.

The hike to the lake is a hefty five miles uphill, and since it was after noon, the men contented themselves with beauty shots along Slate Creek, and waited for me to arrive the next morning, in my truck.

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I had foolishly promised Royce and Jeff that I would find some outfitters with horses, for free even. At that time I firmly believed in the power of TV to seduce even an outfitter who had hobnobbed with Hollywood nobility.

Turns out it wasn’t glitter that did the trick; it was fishing that enticed them, fishing in the Boulder chain lakes deep in the heart of the White Clouds.

In the early days of Outdoor Idaho my one official duty was to memorize and deliver on-camera transitional standups between the various segments of the show. This was in the days when Outdoor Idaho truly was a segmented show.

For this particular program, the standups would attempt to connect hummingbirds to walleyes to a holster maker to a place called Rock Creek.

Royce was flexible enough with his writing skills to make it work. I just had to deliver his words authentically and from the heart in the 30 seconds I had for each one.

When I arrived the next day I did have two horsemen with me who had generously agreed to assist us. They were hoping to fish in the Boulder Chain lakes and saw us as a reason to do so.  Jeff and the packers loaded the camera gear onto the steady horses, and we all started up a different trail than the day before.

My job was to hike and memorize the words that Royce had rewritten the night before, when he was having a hard time sleeping. That’s what producer-writers do. They lie awake worrying about the next day. Royce didn’t know it, but he had good reason to worry.

We hadn’t gotten more than two miles up the trail when Royce spotted an aged barn with pine wood that had turned a rusty orange hue, perfect as the background for a standup about a holster maker. Jeff removed the camera gear from the horses while I mapped out my entrances and exits.

Royce remembers what happened next, since my brain was attempting to commit to memory the words that would hold the show together. I had convinced myself that I thus played a crucial role. Of course, Royce’s script was important, too.

“I noticed Bruce had joined Jeff at the camera, and they were taking turns looking through the viewfinder,” remembers Royce. “When I got to the camera, Jeff looked up and shrugged. ‘It records snow.’ I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good.”

After half an hour of tearing apart the camera and inspecting each part, Royce had to tell the waiting horsemen that the trip was indefinitely postponed.

“How do you tell two horse packers who’ve gone to all this trouble and expense for nothing more than a credit at the end of the show, that the show was off?” Royce spoke to no one in particular. “We have big problems,” he told them. “The recorder’s not putting pictures on the tape. We have to drive back to Boise and get a different recorder.”

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Since there would be no shooting in the foreseeable future, Royce suggested I go with the packers into Boulder Lakes and fish to my heart’s content. Meanwhile Royce and Jeff would hike back to the station wagon, drive to Stanley, call the TV station manager, and convince someone to drive up Highway 21 with a different recorder.

Jeff decided he would be the one to head to Lowman, the halfway point, and exchange the malfunctioning recorder with one that worked sufficiently well to allow the team to finish the show that aired in a few days.

The next morning, Royce and Jeff were ready to try it again. Jeff had made it back to Stanley and had even gotten a few hours of sleep. The problem, the engineers explained, was a small transistor the size of a pea. Jeff said he was going to make an earring out of it. Even he was getting frustrated.

The new plan was for Royce and Jeff to hike the 5 miles uphill to Crater Lake, and to shoot beauty shots until the outfitters and I found a way to get from the Boulder Chain Lakes to Crater Lake. Then Royce would conduct interviews with the outfitters and find places to kick out all the transition standups. As far as Royce and Jeff knew, the plan was working.

Suffice it to say that the outfitters had by now figured they had better things to do than take another chance with us. They wished me well and headed down the trail, in the opposite direction from Crater Lake. 

I was now on my own. It took me longer than it perhaps should have -- Royce and Jeff had seriously considered a search party -- but I eventually arrived at Crater Lake around noon.

Royce and Jeff were not happy about the loss of horses to carry the heavy gear back to the rig, but they did appreciate that I had stuffed my backpack with cheese, salami, and crackers, to go with the two candy bars they carried with them.

I was optimistically thinking the day would still be salvageable: we would shoot the standups, shoot whatever beauty shots were still needed, and hightail it back to the station wagon before dark.

But that was before I heard about the batteries.  Earlier Jeff had begun shooting wildflowers and grasses and the small animals along the water’s edge.

“He was hardly gone 10 minutes,” said Royce, “but the way he walked back said something was wrong.”  

“It’s the batteries,” Jeff exclaimed through clinched teeth. “The damned things only give me about five or eight minutes of shooting on each one. How could they have sent these old, screwed up batteries!”

Both men believed there would not be enough battery charge to shoot all the transitions, even if I did something I had never done before: kick out a perfect standup with the right inflection in no more than two takes.

Royce reminded me what I said before we headed down the trail. “It was all worth it,” I apparently had said, "because the fishing was great at Boulder Lakes. And I was glad I brought the garlic butter, because we fried a bunch of little fish in it. It was the best dinner I’ve had this year.” Sounds like something I might have said.

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The next morning we all ate breakfast at the Stanley lodge and began the drive back the 1 ½ hours to the top of the ridge from the mining camp, where we would shoot the standups. We didn’t trust Dooder, so we piled into my truck.

“Bruce’s truck changed the plan almost immediately,” remembered Royce. “We made it to a grove of quaking aspen, when the truck began to overheat. The hill was very steep, and the truck just seemed to know what was in store and decided to call a halt to all of it. We decided we’d introduce the hummingbird story from inside the grove.

“Everything was fine until Jeff turned on the recorder and began to shoot. That second recorder died. For a moment there was stunned silence. This could not be. Jeff tried to fix the recorder the way he had tried with the first one. ‘I’m not getting anything,’ he hissed. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He seemed momentarily to go mad. The outburst made all of us feel better.”

There was nothing we could do but head back down the mountain and back to Boise. We stopped at the Challis Ranger Station outside of Clayton to call Boise.

Royce was still furious. “How could you do this to us!” he yelled into the phone. “How could you send batteries that last only 10 minutes, and a recorder that won’t work more than an hour!” But everyone knew this meant another trip for Royce and Jeff.

I could tell that Royce wasn’t being especially kind when he suggested I go fishing. It was that or a six-hour drive to Boise and back. He knew what I would choose.

Eventually, persistence did pay off and the next morning we were back up Railroad Ridge to shoot the series of standups needed to finish a show that aired in two days.  

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On the way back down the mountain, Jeff was in one of his pensive moods. “Who are we trying to kid?  We're way ahead of our equipment, and I don't see that changing any time soon.  Maybe we should stop fooling ourselves and just do simple stories. Maybe we should just stay in the studio."  Royce and I knew he didn’t really mean it, but we also knew there was truth in his musings.

It’s been years since I’ve watched that 1987 show. I remember how impressed I was with what Royce and Jeff managed to create in the edit bay in a short amount of time. The wording of the standups seemed to work, and some of my entrances and exits even were presentable.

That was all a long time ago, and so much has changed since then. Today's equipment is superior and able to withstand ten miles on the back of a horse, plus it's high definition. But I still remember how we felt that day, the hopeless feeling, how frustrated and angry we felt... and how good the fishing was.