Although central Idaho's Salmon-Challis sustained some major burns during the 2000 fire season, the forest is big enough to simply swallow the inevitable infernos as an essential means of clearing the forest of dead and shrubby wood. This is wild, untamed country, where wolf packs roam the range and hunt in the largest wilderness area in the contiguous United States.
Salmon-Challis is a 1.8-million-acre forest of canyons and mountains. The Salmon River continues to carve deeper into the rock, creating canyons with abyss-like depths of 5,000 feet. The whitewater serpent that rages within beckons rafters from all over the world to descend these untamed waters.
The erosion and exposure of Idaho Batholite formed the unforgiving ridges of the Lost River Range. Rock climbers can scale an intricate labyrinth of sheer rock walls and crags. Hikers can explore over 1,200 miles of trails, half of which penetrate remote reaches of wilderness beneath a canopy of ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, western larch, grand fir, and alpine larch.
Expect to encounter a critter or two, as the wilderness areas are teeming with wildlife including Bighorn sheep, mountain goat, elk, mule, white-tailed deer, moose, marten, lynx, coyote, wolverine. And don't forget to check the skies for soaring raptors in search of prey.
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