That Dam Wilderness

I first read the rumor on Dean Lords' blog—There are boulders below the old Teton Dam.
Like any aspiring explorer, I immediately consulted my maps and assembled a team for the expedition. Edmund Hillary I was not, so instead of paper maps wrapped in fragrant leather, I had satellite photos downloaded from the Internet. My expeditionary team did not include any bearded hardmen, instead I brought a girl that I had been trying to impress for weeks. Her name was Brionna.
We drove until we found a rusty white gate that said Bureau of Reclamation. I parked in the sagebrush and we hiked down into the canyon, eager at the prospect of untouched boulders. Passing a huge mound of earth, I wondered where the wreckage of the dam was. We were definitely in the right place—twisted metal was everywhere and the concrete spillway was unmistakable. I didn’t realize for a few months that the dirt mound actually was the dam.
After a mile or so, we found a shining white boulder sticking out of the pebbled valley floor. Though I was hardly in the wilderness, I wondered why we had walked all this way just to climb one ten-foot rock.

Over the next summer, this shallow canyon, carved by disaster, would be the focus of the local rock climbing community. We soldiered out day after day with landing pads, chalk, and very tight shoes. Our purpose was to find new rocks to climb. Our real goal was to find some peace and quiet, in ourselves and our surroundings.
When climbing boulders, ropes are not used. A boulderist will not typically venture more than 15 feet from the ground, and will protect himself with thick foam mats.
Some have compared climbing boulders to sprinting 100 feet, calling it pointless. They may not understand that climbing boulders is much different from climbing mountains. A mountaineer has a destination firmly in mind and will usually follow the path of least resistance to get there. A boulderist looks for the hardest way up. A mountaineer follows a route; a boulderist solves a problem.
This last bit is quite literal—in the common speech of rock climbers, the path up a boulder is called a problem. Solving it requires a delicate mix of awareness, power, and faith, and a willingness to try the same few moves hundreds of times until the motion is perfect.
The time spent repeating the same moves and slowly creeping towards exhaustion gives a person time to solve other problems. Last summer I often thought about what I should do when I graduated college. Chad Witbeck, a math student and one of my frequent cohorts, solves math problems in his head.
He let this slip a few weeks ago on the drive out to the dam site. It was a practice I had never heard of, but coming from one of our university’s brightest students, it made sense. He explained, “I find climbing relaxing and it clears my mind. The kind of math I do requires abstract thinking, so I like to have a problem in my head when my mind is clear.”
Others of this diverse group find that there’s no room to think about anything but the climb. “I think about the crux [the most difficult move]” said Riley Rollins, another local. “I do the moves over and over in my head when I’m going to sleep at night. My hands start sweating.”
Of course, the peace of the outdoors could never be limited to only climbers. The Teton River is a common fly fishing spot, and many sportsmen like to ride the trails on four-wheelers and mountain bikes.
I remember one day when a roommate came home after a very disappointing day. He wasn’t a climber, but I still thought he could use a visit to the Teton Dam site. We hiked down about an hour before sunset and cooked our dinner over a small fire. The driftwood we used was almost certainly deposited there by the flood. Using it to feed ourselves seemed a fitting symbol for the unique way that the dam can help a body recharge.
Thirty three years ago, a worker noticed a wet spot on the leeward side of the dam. Within a day, the entire left side of the dam was gone, seven communities were flooded, and 11 people were gone forever. It was a day that residents of the valley will never forget. Yet amid the wreckage and the scars emerged a peaceful place to enjoy Idaho.

This article will appear in Idaho Magazine this summer.