Where’s My hat?                              

(pretty close)

 

When people ask me if I’m an Idaho native, I tell them, "No, I came to this state with my pants on."

What they’re really asking, politely, is How did someone like you get to host and guide the intermountain West’s longest running and most awarded outdoor show? And what’s been the formula for success for almost four decades?

I sometimes ask myself that, too.

So, where to begin.

Traveling with my family in a green American-made station wagon, with a duckling won at a school fair in the far back seat, I arrived in Boise in 1960 with my mom and dad and two brothers. I was ten and fresh off a 5^th grade U.S. geography test where my only mistake was the misspelling of Idaho’s capital city. For this young North Dakota boy, that misspelling was more humiliating than not being a native Idahoan.

I guess my story is not so different from that of all the others currently pouring into the state, except maybe for the duck part. Like most Midwesterners, I knew next to nothing about this strangely configured state. And what I did know turned out to be wrong. Idaho is not the “Tick Fever State,” as one bumper sticker proclaimed. Idaho's crazy border with Montana was not the result of drunken surveyors, and “Idaho” is not an Indian word for “Gem of the Mountains.”

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What hooked me is what has hooked so many others. The Sawtooths. I still remember coming around the bend on Highway 21 near Stanley for the first time. Suddenly my world got a whole lot bigger.

The hook was set during a fifty-mile hike sponsored by the city of Boise, with men and pack horses, and a dozen kids I didn’t know.  After that, personal trips with high school buddies to lakes like Alice and Imogene, Toxaway and Edith pretty much ended any connection I might have had with the state of my birth.

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Growing up Catholic, I studied the Bible, but there was another bible that fascinated me. “Mountain Lakes of Idaho,” published by the state’s Fish & Game Department, featured 20 pages of lakes found in various mountain ranges, complete with trails and descriptions about fishing, with words like “excellent,” “good,” and “poor.”

I still have that 1965 dog-eared pamphlet, and I pull it out when I want to reminisce about how sweet life was back then. My folks would drop us off somewhere along that menacing expanse of towering peaks. After promising to meet them later in the week, we would begin our trek into the “promised land.”  

 

But the Sawtooths had an official name that made it even sweeter. The Idaho Primitive Area had no roads, no motorized vehicles, no permanent buildings. But it did have lots of hiking and camping and mountains of natural beauty. We didn’t realize it at the time, but a decade later that Primitive Area would become the Sawtooth Wilderness, and part of the newly created Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

We were serious about fishing in our Primitive Area, and made sure we always carried butter and salt, along with oatmeal, rice, dried fruit, and chocolate bars. Our ace in the hole was a small container of worms, sure to impress the large fish our bible promised us. I suspect the prophet Isaiah would have approved of our slavish devotion to God’s creation.

No wonder it took me years to stop seeing Idaho as merely a series of lakes and mountains, with the Sawtooths the fairest of them all. Idaho was the perfect place for this “mountain man.” Deserts and canyonlands would just have to wait til I was ready.

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Few may know this, but Outdoor Idaho got its start in 1983 as a co-production of the state’s Fish & Game Dept and Idaho Public Television. There really wasn’t a blueprint for such a collaborative effort, but it did make sense.

Idaho Fish & Game was a nationally recognized leader in wildlife management, and they were proud of their cutting-edge projects. They wanted a TV show that highlighted their efforts. Each half hour program would feature a handful of “hook and bullet” stories that their constituency would appreciate. “Hunter Orange” and “Fish Counts” and “Chukar Survival Rate” were high on the list.

 

For their part, Idaho Public Television had a budding statewide network. Besides, they could always use a new show. The $25,000 that IdahoPTV received from F&G would cover travel and production expenses, and we'd cover camera and editing equipment.

 

The thinking was that, in time, the fans of Lawrence Welk and Big Bird might come to appreciate the latest on the steelhead count over Lower Granite Dam and hunter orange.

The marriage of these two state agencies wasn’t exactly one made in heaven, but the show began to find its audience, something that’s especially difficult with a show that was only produced once a month. The twice-weekly airings would come much later.

 

The two individuals who did most of the work in those early years were writer Royce Williams from F&G and producer/director/videographer/editor Peter Morrill from IdahoPTV.

The host was Doug Copsey, one of the people who helped establish the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. He was equally at home on stage or on a mountain trail. But the first couple of seasons could have been called Indoor Idaho, because Doug hosted the show behind a desk in the station’s TV studio.

 

The very first show, in 1983, featured segments on kokanee salmon near Anderson Ranch Dam, dealing with a problem grizzly bear, a road closure that benefited elk habitat, antelope near Arco, and a studio discussion with raptor expert Morley Nelson. It was a magazine program, with segments that didn't relate to one another. That's something that would change in later years. 

Doug left his hosting duties part way into the third season. Outdoor Idaho continued as a co-production. It just needed a host.

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But why me? Why was I chosen?  It wasn’t because of my excellent outdoor skills, although I had built a log cabin outside Idaho City in the 1970's.  A freak blowdown near the ghost town of Graham had uprooted several acres of lodgepole pine, just waiting for someone with an old beat-up truck with terrible brakes, and an unreliable McCulloch chainsaw to haul them away.

 

But back to their choice of Host. I’m pretty sure they chose me because the price was right. I was already on staff, working for the daily public affairs show “Idaho Reports.” That meant they wouldn’t have to pay me any more. I was available, much to the chagrin of "Idaho Reports," and "free." They figured the price was right. And it helped that I didn’t require much makeup back then and had a halfway pleasant voice, or so I was told.  

 

And I wore a hat. Granted, it was a black Greek fisherman’s cap, picked up when I was bumming around Europe one winter in the 1970's, but it was a hat, nonetheless.  I was convinced all real outdoorsmen wore hats. For my first hosting duties, I wore the Greek cap. I also wore cowboy boots to Bruneau Dunes State Park. Walking up a sand dune in cowboy boots is not exactly a thing of beauty.

Royce and Peter decided it was time for an “intervention.” No Greek fisherman’s hat for Outdoor Idaho, and cowboy boots only when appropriate.

 

A new host was the perfect time to throw off any semblance of the show’s indoor trappings. Instead of a studio, the three of us would head out to exotic places, like Jump Creek and Henry’s Lake and the St. Joe River.

To give the show that “outdoor” feel, I would talk to the camera along the banks of the Salmon River or in front of an impressive mountain or lake. The words came from Royce. We called them “standups.” A typical show usually had four or five standups, each about 30 seconds in length and sometimes re-written an hour or two before delivery. They acted as bridges between the various segments. Sometimes the topics had little relationship to each other, like knife making and hunter orange. But there was just enough connection that a dexterous writer like Royce could exploit and keep the show flowing. I was always impressed.

 

But even when the standups were a bit of a stretch, we figured it was no different from what host Marlin Perkins was probably  doing for Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom,” the leader in national outdoor shows at the time. “While Jim attempts to attach the tracking device to the enraged lion, I’m safe in the chopper. You can be safe, too, with Mutual of Omaha.”                    

Since the standup was the part of the show where I was on-air, I took those moments seriously. Sometimes it was the 6^th or 7th “take” before my walking and talking measured up to everyone’s expectations. We then looked to the cameraman to see if he was happy with his zooms and pans. Sometimes one standup could take half an hour before everyone was satisfied.

I was beginning to see there was nothing easy about going outside to produce an outdoor show.

 

And then there were the unexpected things. I had recently purchased contac lenses and was still getting used to them. As we hiked to the Jump Creek waterfall in early spring for my first standup, I had a bad habit of picking at foliage along the trail. It didn’t affect the standup, but by the next morning, my face had swollen, and I couldn’t open one of my eyes. I didn’t realize just how much the poison ivy had altered the contour of my face until one of my friends approached me and asked if I was Bruce’s brother.

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By the sixth season, the folks at F&G had decided that the agency’s hunting and fishing community preferred their money be spent on stories about hunting and fishing.  By then Peter and Royce had moved on to other assignments, and I had taken up many of the writing and producing duties for the show.

Apparently, my topics were not helping to keep the co-production alive. The folks at Fish & Game were apparently not as interested as I was about hang gliding, rock climbing at the City of Rocks, hiking to high mountain lakes with llamas, finding and cooking morel mushrooms, and rafting the Bruneau River with the original kayakers.

The good news was that the show was expanding its audience. The bad news was that Outdoor Idaho was no longer a co-production.

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That led to the $25,000 question: Would Idaho Public Television step up to the plate and give Outdoor Idaho a chance to continue to build an audience?  Or would the station follow the path of least resistance and do what most public TV stations in the country did when something was just too pricey for the bottom line... just drop the show. 

 

I remember a brief conversation I had with station manager Jerry Garber. He asked me pointblank, “Can the station realistically pull off an outdoor series by itself?” I say it was a brief discussion because I uttered something like ‘Hell, yes, we can. And you won’t regret it!” Later I came close to eating those words.

But back to that ‘free’ part.

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I got into television not because I took a communication course in college. I got into TV because I was watching “Idaho Reports”  one cold Friday evening in February in my unfinished log cabin outside Idaho City, where visquine substituted for windows.  At the time, “Idaho Reports” was a daily program that covered the antics of the Idaho Legislature. The show’s set was located on the top floor of the Capitol building, making it easier to nab lawmakers for the live 6:30 pm daily program. 

 

One of the reporters, Jean McNeil, was talking about some legislative issue, and suddenly she just disappeared. I was perplexed at the peculiar ending, as a BBC program then started up. It was 7 pm on a dark winter evening when I decided I could handle the job. 

 

I began my letter writing campaign the next week, touting my many qualifications. Now, I was just brash enough to think I could do almost anything I set my mind to.  After all, I was teaching 8^th grade in Idaho City; writing and editing the Idaho World, the state’s oldest newspaper; keeping the Boise Basin library operating; and tending bar at O’Leary’s Saloon, while also building my log cabin. Doing all this at the same time still kept me below the poverty line, so I knew I could survive at a public television station.

I wrote several letters with nary a reply, not even a letter asking for a pledge. I realized this was not going to be an easy sell.

After a sufficient amount of time had passed and no reply letter appeared, I drove down from Idaho City to pester the PBS staff in person. But I never got past the receptionist, a diminutive woman with a no-nonsense attitude.

 

I realized what I must do. If I really wanted to work in TV, I needed to put my life on the line. I needed to volunteer for three months during the summer. That did break the ice jam, and the receptionist finally walked me down a long hall to a little room on the Boise State University campus, where the “Idaho Reports” staff was working. I got to meet Marc Johnson, Gary Richardson, and Jean McNeil, the woman who had mysteriously disappeared that one cold winter evening.

They welcomed me as one welcomes someone you’re convinced doesn’t belong there, but they were cordial enough and even allowed me to sit at a desk. A few weeks earlier, the reporter who sat there had left for San Francisco. Talk about serendipity. I knew I had three months to learn my new craft and to make myself indispensable. Even I realized volunteering would only get me so far.

 

My task was to learn the TV lingo and to come up with story ideas for the daily half hour ‘Idaho Reports’ show, hosted by Marc Johnson. I still remember the pride I felt seeing my name in the credits for the first time, under “Production Assistance.”

The staff no doubt questioned some of my first stories, on Idaho wineries, Idaho gambling, drunk driving on Highway 21, horse racing at Les Bois Park. But with each half hour show under my belt, I was feeling better about my lifestyle choices.

I was on my way, and I knew my 8^th grade students in Idaho City were wrong to laugh when I told them I would not be coming back the following year, that I was going into Television. 

 

When the time came three months later to depart my self-inflicted volunteer tenure, I said my Goodbyes to everyone and began walking out the door, heart in hand. I was literally out the door and down the sidewalk when Operations Director Bob Pyle called me back and informed me that they had just found some extra money. No guarantees, but they thought they could pay me for the next month or two. I was delighted they were willing to take a chance on me. But by then everyone knew I was a cheap date.

 

I remember having to fill out lots of State forms. One form asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” It was an innocuous question when I look back at it, but I had reached my limit with forms.  Why couldn’t it just be a handshake, like it was in Idaho City? Convinced that no one would even read my answers, I decided to test my theory.

“I get my ideas from Voices. I hear Voices.” And sure enough, no one said a word about my answer. No one had even read it.  Of course, I suppose it’s possible that someone did read my answer and figured, “Poor boy, he probably does hear voices. He seems the type.”

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I’ll be the first to admit that my resume was downright sad. I had attended high school at Mt. Angel Seminary, where I studied to be a Catholic priest and where I had developed a knack for writing.

How did I get there? It turned out that the Benedictine nun who taught 7^th grade at Sacred Heart School in Boise got the assignment the next year to teach 8^th grade. It was a bit strange, but we just figured they were running out of nuns.

What that meant is that she had two years to instill in me a belief that I was someone special, that I had what she called a “Vocation,” and that the next obvious step was the Seminary, located outside the little town of Mt. Angel, Oregon. To this day some of us still speak of Sister Mary Barracuda.

 

At Mt Angel Seminary my high school teachers were Benedictine monks. Everyone on that hilltop wore long black robes, including me.  Life was incredibly structured. You knew where you’d be every hour of the day. The first bell rang at 6:00 a.m.; the second bell ten minutes later. You better have your bed made and be heading to study hall by 6:30. Then a walk to the monastery crypt for religious services at 7 a.m. A half-hour later, the 150 of us walked to the breakfast hall in a nearby building. We cherished that half hour between the end of breakfast and the first class at 9:00 a.m.

My freshman class was the largest ever, 65 students. It was the era of Pope John the 23^rd, and there was a feeling that “change” was on the horizon for the Catholic Church. The size of our class seemed to prove it.

 

However, one of the things that changed almost daily in my world was the number of students in our class. Sometimes a student would leave between evening study hall and breakfast, with nary a good-bye. Apparently, having a “vocation” in a monastery of monks, with no girls on campus and no mom and dad nearby was not what some teenagers had signed up for. By senior year in high school, our original class had dwindled to about 25.

The classes themselves were rigorous and fairly classic; my favorites were English and Speech and Debate. I’m sure I landed in the 99^th percentile in punctuation,  thanks to Father Ignatius of the Order of the Benedictines. My debate partner and I won several Speech and Debate tournaments. I also won First Place in “After Dinner Speaking” for the entire state of Oregon. My speech consisted of making fun of my seminary training.

 

I figured all this gave me a leg up in the writing category. But in Television, the melding of words and interviews with video involved a whole different skill set.

However, I had another ace up my sleeve. After graduating from the University of Oregon, I spent a few weeks in a tent outside the mountain town of Idaho City, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Town That Refused to Die.” I wandered into O’Leary’s Saloon one day, and the bartender just happened to be an architecture student from the U of O. We got to talking, and that’s when he informed me that he was heading back to school later that week. He said that Pat O’Leary would be looking for a new bartender. He introduced me to Mr. O’Leary, we shook hands, and I was hired. Pat told me I’d pick up the necessary skills soon enough.

 

But not quite soon enough. A ‘ditch’ was the primary drink of many of the ‘locals.’ It’s a simple drink of bourbon and water. Thinking that the City Marshall deserved better, I ran a lemon slice around the lip of his glass and dropped in a red cherry. One of the locals, Jerry Lansing, was sitting next to the Marshall at the bar. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Reichert, you’re not going to last 2 weeks.”

That’s when I knew Idaho City was where I belonged.

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It was as a bartender at O’Leary’s Saloon where I came to appreciate the authenticity of people not exactly equipped to deal with the increasingly urban nature of Idaho. One of my favorite characters was Hank Bertram, an old placer miner living near Little Muddy Creek outside of Placerville. Hank would come into the bar once a week with his small vial of gold, happy to show it to anyone who seemed interested.  I once asked him what he did before mining. “I used to be a religious fanatic,” he said, “but there’s no future in it.”

 

Earl Bream was another miner whom I favored. He looked mean, but was really a gentle soul, unfortunately with a face only a mother could love. His bald head and a black patch over one eye meant no one messed with Earl.

 One Sunday afternoon, my folks walked into O’Leary’s Saloon, no doubt to see how I was wasting my college education. They were babysitting their young grandson, Wes. I thought it was a sweet gesture when the old miner came over to say Hi. As Earl bent down eye level with five-year-old Wes, the old miner growled, “I’ve got an eye out for you.” My nephew did what most anyone would do in that situation. He burst into tears. To this day, Wes has stayed out of Idaho City bars.

 

O’Leary’s Saloon could be a rowdy place, especially on weekends when it seemed half of Boise drove the 40 miles up to Idaho City. Back then, you could walk from bar to bar with a drink in your hand. It was definitely a Wild West town.  On one particularly busy evening someone threw a chair through the large leaded stained-glass window that my friend Kenn Smith and I had built for Pat O’Leary. The window spelled out the word Saloon in Irish colors, which you could read if you were inside the tavern. Tourists coming up from Boise no doubt wondered what a Noolas was. We didn’t care. They were flat landers, and we were catering to the locals.

 

To those who questioned my qualifications to be a writer/producer at Idaho Public Television, I informed them that I knew a lot about structure, and I also knew how to handle myself when things got rowdy. But let’s face it, by then everyone knew my main selling point was that I was cheap.
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A hat is never just a hat. It says something about you. Maybe it says you haven’t come to terms with not having hair. Maybe it’s an adult security blanket. Those who wear hats don’t really need a reason. But here’s one for you.

 One of the “duties as assigned” at IdahoPTV was to travel around the state with our Development team, the ones who raise money for the station. We would speak to large groups of supporters who were hoping to be entertained with clips of upcoming shows. They wanted to know that their $50 donation was being put to good use.

We were in Lewiston one evening, and when it was my turn to speak, I decided not to wear my hat on stage because it seemed inappropriate.  As I was describing our latest Outdoor Idaho show, on the River of No Return, someone in the back of the auditorium yelled out, “Put your hat back on!” The audience applauded. As I told my colleagues later, they only have to tell me once.

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It was the 1970’s when I arrived in Idaho City, and it was obvious that the town was on the cultural cusp. Loggers and miners on one side, and long-haired kids moving into town on the other. As any good bartender would do, I tried to position myself somewhere in the middle, serving drinks to the locals, while working with a group of artsy friends who hung out at the town’s other major bar, the Miners’ Exchange. O'Leary's had '"Big John" and Miners Exchange had Doc Watson. I never heard if it was a stroke or a heart attack that sent Big John crashing to the floor; I wasn't working that evening. I just know it was the end of Big John's musical career.

 

In high school I had read the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Our Town.” I had even dreamed of acting in it one day. The first thing I had noticed about Idaho City was that the town was filled with real “characters.”

After discussing it with some friends, I ordered copies of the play from Samuel French, Inc. In January about 15 of us began gathering weekly at my cabin to read scripts. By then I had built stained glass windows to replace the visquine. 

After some light refreshments, everyone agreed that it was a great way to fight cabin fever. No one thought we’d actually perform the play, and certainly not in front of an audience. We were just going to read scripts to get through the 10 below temperatures.

But as the cold set in and the snow piled up, and winter blues began casting a pall over our little town, the group started to warm to the idea of an April 1^st performance. We figured the date -- April Fool's Day -- made a lot of sense.

 

We borrowed seed money from the Boise Basin Public Library, promising to pay it back from the $5 tickets we would collect at the door.

Our little libary became the ‘bank’ for other Basin enterprises as well, like our annual Arts & Crafts Festival, conceived by Patty Jo Breiding and me one spring day in front of the Boise Basin Merc. That Festival lasted more than 20 years before it became too big a burden for anyone to handle.

The Basin library also fronted the creation of Idaho City University (ICU), where academics trailed far behind the fine art of having fun.  It was our willingness to expand the traditional definition of what a library could do for a small town that impressed Idaho State Librarian Helen Miller. Later, when we applied for a $25,000 grant to expand our one-story 20x40 foot white cinder block building, Helen Miller made sure we received the money and even came up for our grand re-opening.

 

At our inaugural spring gathering of ICU in Diamond Lil's Saloon, famous author Dick d'Easum was our guest speaker. Dick had written four books on Idaho history, including "Sawtooth Tales" and "Fragments of Villainy." We knew he would be perfect.

The dress code for the occasion was Idaho City black tie, and it was fascinating to see men in borrowed tuxedos and logger boots and women in sequined dresses with beautiful hats. Dick d'Easum spoke movingly of ICU to the hundred people crammed into the bar. He declared the new university worthy of being part of Idaho's university system, even superior to some of the current colleges and universities. Dick understood his role that evening and played his part perfectly. We showered him with praise, bought his wife and him drinks, and bestowed on him the title of Dean of the Idaho City University English Department.

 

At our autumn Prom Dance, this time in Idaho City's town hall, the numberm of ICU graduates had grown. During the musicians' setup, Peter Morrill tripped and somehow managed to fall into the Gib Hockstrasser band, denting the lone saxaphone. But the band played on. Friend Jake Hoffman and I were honored as the Administrative Assistants to the ICU President. It didn't seem to matter that no one knew who the president was. We announced that everyone could receive an official-looking Idaho City University college diploma, and that if you wanted your name prominently displayed on the diploma, it would cost you $10.

 

By the following year's Spring Ball, everyone who had donated to ICU was made a member of the faculty. Jake and I knew that Idaho Public Television was going through some rough times over shows that the station had aired, so we bestowed on Peter the title of Dean of Censorship. We might also have made some humorous comments about the State Board of Education.

 

Several employees of the SBOE happened to be at the Spring Ball that evening, so the word quickly got back to the Executive Director. He in turn immediately contacted Peter Morrill, wanting to know his role in the disrespectful event.

Not wanting to get the ICU Dean of Censorship in trouble, Jake Hoffman and I hurried down to the State Board of Education office to personally apologize and to absolve Peter of any wrong-doing. I remember feeling so relieved when the SBOE Executive Director's secretary told us he wasn't in his office. He apparently was down at the Legislature pleading for more dollars for public schools.

We left our regards and quickly headed back to Idaho City. 

 But I digress.

 

By April 1^st, with our lines memorized and directors and set designers feeling good about our chances, we opened "Our Town" to a full house.  Our town was coming to life in “Our Town.”  

We received permission to use the oldest standing Masonic Temple in the northwest. The 1865 wooden structure came with all the amenities, like old fashioned gas lights, wooden benches, and frogs croaking in the nearby pond. As authentic as the play itself.

 

Everyone who wanted a role had gotten one. Mine was Doc Gibbs, one of the main characters in the 3-act play.  Boise attorney Byron Johnson also played a role. This soon-to-be Idaho Supreme Court Justice didn’t have any lines, but his job was an important one. During intermission between the second and third acts, Byron headed down to the town’s bars to retrieve Randy. Randy was the town drunk in the third Act. He didn’t have a speaking part, but no one ever questioned his authenticity.

 

The play’s high point comes in that third act, when young Emily dies and goes to the afterlife. My girlfriend Jenny Laper played Emily. Jenny, a Leo, knew how to act.  Not used to being dead, she was anxious to return to her old life. The other dead spirits warn her, but she insists. However, she soon realizes that the living are too caught up in self-centeredness and trivial matters, and her excitement turns to disillusionment. She hurries back to her body’s resting place, with the realization that our time on earth is an irreplaceable gift, one to be relished every moment. 

 

And through her tears Emily utters some poignant lines: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” To which the stage manager replies, “No. The saints and poets, maybe, they do some.”

The play really is a tear-jerker. As I looked out over the audience through the peep hole in the curtain, I could see loggers and miners and young folks seated next to each other, many of them sobbing. Playwright Thornton Wilder sure knew how to get to an audience.

 

The next week’s major headline in the Idaho World proclaimed the play a success. Perhaps it was a bit self-serving, but as Editor of the newspaper, I thought it entirely appropriate. Besides, the  state's largest newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, had given the play a positive review. Even a reporter from another town could feel the strong bonds at the core of the small but big-hearted community.

Afterwards, the mayor bestowed upon me and the others the key to Idaho City, a big ten-inch wooden key that opened nothing. It’s still on my mantle, further proof that “Our Town,” my town, was a rousing success on so many levels.

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After the amicable divorce between Fish & Game and IdahoPTV, an astute observer might notice that the main difference in the show was one of organization. Is the show about many different topics, as in the past, or does each show have a single overarching theme?

 

We wasted no time answering that question. Our first show out of the gate we called “Pend Oreille Country.” Every segment featured some aspect of life around Idaho’s largest and deepest lake. And to prove that there were no hard feelings, we interviewed Idaho Fish & Game Commissioner Dick Hanson. He and his wife lived along the big lake, and so it made some sense. Besides, we didn’t want to lose our access to Idaho’s difficult-to-find wildlife.

 

The diversity of those first programs was impressive: “The High Desert,” “Winter Solitude,” “Under Idaho,” “Idaho Horses,” “The Big Game State,” “Vanishing Idaho,” “A State Without a National Park,” “Empire of the Snake, parts 1&2,” “Searching for the Soul of the Forest Service, parts 1&2.”

 

An astute observer might also notice that, given the nature of some of those first shows, Outdoor Idaho had begun a perilous slide into dangerous territory. “Stay in your own lane,” said a friend who was worried about the show getting too political. “Birds, bass fishing, and beautiful places is where Outdoor Idaho needs to camp out.”

 

I agreed with him but only up to a point. Believing Idahoans to be sharp, resourceful, and pragmatic, I was convinced there was a way to frame public policy issues that most Idahoans would appreciate. And I was determined to find that pathway.

Outdoor Idaho was headed in a new direction, with a new and broader mission. My hope was that the show could travel around the state, helping explain Idaho to Idahoans and maybe even play a role in connecting a state separated and confounded by its tortuous geology.

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