Payette River, North Fork

About

North Fork Payette River, Idaho — 1862 Boise Basin Gold, 1840s-1880s Mining, 2010s Payette Scenic Byway 75-mi Adams. Whitewater defines the North Fork's public face. USGS gauge 10086500 shows an average of about 758 cubic feet per second, and boaters on the Class IV Cabarton Run — a stretch of roughly 10 miles — look for flows between 375 and 1,150 cfs. The river is steep: between the splash dams and Banks it drops over a half mile straight down across 18 miles, a gradient that makes the North Fork one of the most demanding runs in the state. The whole river drains about 1,400 square miles and flows south and west to its confluence with the South Fork at the town of Banks.

Long before boaters arrived, Long Valley was shared summer country at the meeting of three peoples: the Nez Perce to the north, the Shoshone to the southeast, and the Northern Paiute to the southwest. Bands such as the Sheepeater Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Bannock kept no permanent villages here. They wintered in the drier lower Payette valley and moved up to the lakes and wetlands of Long Valley in spring and summer to fish salmon, hunt, and gather. Camas, whose blue-flowered bulbs grew in dense fields across the valley and neighboring Round Valley, was a dietary staple, and the people deliberately set controlled burns as they broke camp to keep the meadows productive. Those seasonal camps persisted into the mid-19th century, until the Boise Basin gold rush, homesteading, and the conflicts that followed forced the tribes onto reservations.

The 1862 strike reshaped the settlements along the river. By 1867 the town of Horseshoe Bend had shed its original name, Warrinersville, for the one it still carries today. As placer claims faded, timber took hold. In 1902 the Payette Lumber & Manufacturing Company acquired roughly thirty-three thousand acres of state timber in Long Valley and built a large splash dam on the North Fork below Smith's Ferry; releasing the impounded water in a controlled surge flushed cut logs downriver to the mills at Payette. The southern end of Long Valley, downstream of present-day Cascade, became a principal logging center.

Rail soon overtook the river drives. In 1911 the Idaho Northern Railroad pushed up the Payette canyon from Emmett, through Black Canyon and along the North Fork to Smith's Ferry — named for the settler who had bought the ferry operation there in 1891. In 1913 the firm merged with the Wisconsin-based Barber Lumber Company, which had been working the Boise Basin, to form the Boise-Payette Lumber Company, for decades the region's dominant timber operator.

The river's recent story has centered on water-quality recovery in Cascade Reservoir (Lake Cascade), which impounds the North Fork in Long Valley. Decades of logging, grazing, and agricultural runoff loaded the reservoir with phosphorus, and the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality wrote a total maximum daily load for the North Fork Payette River subbasin under the Clean Water Act. DEQ found that external phosphorus inputs must be cut by 37 percent and held down for at least five years to restore the reservoir; a sediment TMDL was written for the river as well, while nutrients were later recommended for delisting where beneficial uses were no longer impaired. The Cascade Reservoir Watershed Phase III Water Quality Management Plan, first laid out in June 2000, was reviewed and revised in February 2009. Today the Payette River Scenic Byway anchors complementary work such as the North Fork Water Quality Project and the North Fork Corridor Management Plan, and the corridor is managed under a BLM/USFS/Valley County framework.