Hells Canyon Gateway Closed

Before it was filled up with water by three dams some 40 years ago, Hells Canyon was a magnificent sight. Though not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, it was considerably deeper. In fact, it was advertised as The World’s Deepest Gorge.

            Weiser, my hometown, was The Gateway to Hells Canyon and the home of its legends. Chief among these was The Chief Joseph, the first boat to travel up stream on the Snake River in Hells Canyon and on the middle fork of the Salmon River, the world famous “River of No Return”.

 Since the advent of the jet boat in the late1960s thousands of people have “returned” up the Salmon, but when I was a boy The Chief Joseph was unique. It was a big gray tub of a boat with a flat bottom curving to form the bow. About 20 or 30 feet aft, two huge motors drove the twin propellers that powered her up the Snake and Salmon Rivers. She was covered by canvas tarps and sat neglected in a bay of the old Penny Arcade in Oregon Trail Park. 

The Chief Joseph is gone now as is Oregon Trail Park. A large water treatment plant now takes up most of the small island located at the confluence of the Snake and Weiser Rivers. I don’t know what became of The Chief Joseph, it probably burned up in one of the frequent fires that have plagued Weiser since its founding in the late 1860s.

It wouldn’t have been an “insurance fire” as the run down Oregon Trail Park buildings were not worth anything and were located on public land. Probably it was careless campers or kids playing with matches. We used to play there a lot when I was a kid in the 1950s and we were known to smoke cigarettes and cigars there while pretending to be riverboat gamblers.

During the 1970s when Weiser’s National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival was a favorite stop for roaming motorcycle gangs, Mortimer’s Island (named for the park’s founder John Mortimer) was a favorite camping spot. The gangs never robbed or hurt anyone, but they did turn the fiddle competition into a drinking and orgy festival that drew more participants and observers than the fiddling.

Biker girls stripped to fiddle music on the flat, wooden awnings over the sidewalks in front of bars. Inside the bars there were wet T-shirt contests and more obscene competitions involving men. Tricycle races from bar to bar were organized with the participants chugging a whiskey and beer “boilermaker” at each bar. Out on Mortimer’s Island the orgies continued nonstop.

Meanwhile, at the high school gymnasium, competing fiddlers scraped and scrapped while small crowds of clean living pensioners tapped their cowboy boots in time trying not to think about what was going on in the bars downtown and at the former Oregon Trail Park.

Before long city council outlawed carrying drinks from bar to bar and the police hired dozens of off duty officers from surrounding towns during fiddle week to crack down on “perversion” on Weiser city streets. The water treatment plant was expanded and the rest of Mortimer’s Island turned into a parking lot. The word “festival” was dropped making the annual event simply a fiddlers’ contest.

The motorcycle gangs never returned and neither did the tourists who came to watch them. Mortimer’s Island, a place of fun and games since the early 1900s when the Oregon Trail Park began attracting tourist from all over the Pacific Northwest, was officially dead.

Hells Canyon near Weiser is nothing but a series of lakes good for crappie and catfish fishing, but not much else. White water rafting and other sports available north of the dams, but Weiser is no longer The Gateway to Hells Canyon. 

Comments

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