Floating The River

Island Park is a wonderful place to live. The recreational opportunities are fantastic. This week Mike and I partook of one of the popular pastimes known as floating the river. We put our two little one-person pontoon boats into the Henry's Lake Outlet and went downstream into the Henry's Fork of the Snake River and got out at the bridge at Mack's Inn. This took us three hours, though we had to do a fair bit of rowing to make that time.

Henry's Lake Outlet is a very narrow, slow moving stream, choked with willows on both banks. It is also very twisty and curvy so that one can never stop steering and rowing. The banks full of willows prevented us from seeing very far in any direction, but it also made for a very quiet, peaceful float, far from the noise of civilization. Henry's Fork was much broader with a smidge more current. The water was much colder, coming from its source at Big Springs. Towards the end of our journey, we passed many vacation homes, each with its own dock, and some form of boat. We saw many blue herons, and a black cormorant swam ahead of us for quite some distance. Just as we came in sight of the bridge, we looked back and saw a moose standing in the river. This area is prime moose habitat.

The wonderful thing about where we live is that the put-in and pull-out spots for our float are both less than five miles from our house. We also intend to explore other sections of the river if the nice weather continues.