Owyhee River

About

Owyhee River, Idaho — 1819 Hawaiian Trappers, Owhyhee. Long before European contact, the Owyhee corridor lay within 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 across those nations. The 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla opened a formal cession framework, extended by further treaties in 1863 and 1867, and the Nez Perce War of 1873–1877 brought that era to a violent close. 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 in the basin today.

The 1819–1821 expedition of Donald McKenzie, who explored what would become southern Idaho, was the first European venture into the region — and the one that left the river its name. Sustained outside interest arrived decades later: from roughly 1860 to 1900 the Owyhee basin drew extensive gold and silver mining, and from about 1880 to 1920 the surrounding country supported widespread logging and ranching. The canyons that had swallowed McKenzie's Hawaiian trappers became, within a generation, a working landscape of camps, claims, and stock.

Federal science reached the drainage in the 1890s, when USGS Idaho Survey teams compiled the first systematic hydrological assessment of the basin. Gauging stations followed in the early decades of the twentieth century, and Idaho Department of Water Resources streamflow surveys extended the record through the 1920s and beyond. Those early measurements established a baseline against which later shifts in the watershed could be judged. Today the river is monitored by USGS gauge 13176400, which records an average discharge of 267 cubic feet per second; paddlers find optimal conditions when flows run between 130 and 400 CFS.

The Owyhee's defining modern chapter came on March 30, 2009, when 120 miles of the river were designated a National Wild and Scenic River — every one of those miles classified as "wild," the most protective category the system offers. Management authority rests with the Bureau of Land Management. The designation set the river apart even within a state rich in protected water: many Idaho rivers belong to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers system, among them the Middle Fork of the Salmon, added in 1968, but the surrounding Owyhee Canyonlands ranks among the largest remaining unprotected wilderness areas in the country, a scale of open desert that gives the corridor its outsized reputation.

That reputation rests as much on the fishing as the scenery. The Owyhee is a premier rainbow trout and smallmouth bass fishery, two species holding different niches in the same drainage and drawing different anglers to water that most must drive a considerable distance to reach. From its headwaters the river carves northward through deeply incised canyons, terrain that bears no resemblance to the timbered mountains found elsewhere in the Idaho interior. Between walls of exposed volcanic stone — rock ranging in age from the late Miocene to the near-recent — riparian ribbons stripe the canyon floors, sheltering a rich assortment of wildlife along a river that has kept much of its wildness intact.