Big Wood River

About

Big Wood River, Idaho — 1882 Bellevue Hailey, 1908 Magic Reservoir, Silver Creek Trout, 137-Mile. Long before mining camps, the Big Wood River flowed through the ancestral territory of the Shoshone-Paiute, the Nez Perce, the Coeur d'Alene, the Kootenai, and the Northern Paiute. The river served as a primary travel corridor, fishing ground, and gathering place, and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, and the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights today. The 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla, the 1863 Treaty of the Oregon Trail, the 1867 Treaty, and the events of the 1873–1877 Nez Perce War established the cession framework across the region.

The river's modern story begins with metal. As the silver and lead boom swept the watershed in the 1880s, prospectors and merchants raised Bellevue — chartered sometime between 1880 and 1882, and Idaho's only remaining chartered city — into one of the upper valley's first enduring settlements. Nearby Hailey, the county seat of Blaine County, was founded in the same era as a mining camp. The Big Wood valley was also logged from the 1860s through the 1920s, feeding the 1870–1910 Idaho white-pine, Douglas-fir, and cedar industry, the expansion of the Oregon Short Line and Northern Pacific railways, and the timber demands of the intermountain-west mines. The exhaustion of the white-pine stands around 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the creation of the Boise, Caribou, and Sawtooth National Forests in the 1920s and 1930s ended large-scale logging.

The river's character shifted again in 1908, when engineers raised the 4,000-acre Magic Reservoir across the lower channel, harnessing its flow to irrigate the arid plain downstream and transforming the river's hydrology. Hydrological study followed close behind: the USGS Idaho Survey of the 1890s through 1910s, the establishment of Big Wood River gauging stations in the early twentieth century, and Idaho Department of Water Resources streamflow surveys through the 1940s produced the first comprehensive assessments of the watershed.

Despite a century of mining, logging, and agricultural impacts, the Big Wood is best known among anglers for its cold, clear water, recommended today for brown trout, brook trout, mountain whitefish, and rainbow trout. Its spring-fed tributary, Silver Creek, has earned a world-class reputation for fly-fishing and its wild brown and rainbow trout, and is protected in part through the Silver Creek Preserve managed by The Nature Conservancy. Since 2010, the Idaho Department of Water Resources, working with Big Wood River Watershed partnerships and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes and Nez Perce Tribe, has pursued streambank stabilization, native fish restocking, and salmon recovery to address the watershed's long history of disturbance.

Managed in part by the Bureau of Land Management, the Big Wood today supports the Sun Valley tourism economy, the Silver Creek trout fishery, and the Magic Reservoir fishery. From a silver-and-lead mining camp to renowned trout water, the river carries its full history in a single 137-mile run out of the Pioneers.