SOUTHERN IDAHO: OWYHEE NORTH FORK

NOVEMBER 2020 & MAY 2021

OWYHEE NORTH FORK

I accessed the North Fork from the Owyhee North Fork Campground, located along Juniper Mountain Road outside of Jordan Valley, Oregon. The road is pretty well maintained, and should be passable to most cars when dry. There is a large pull-out in front of the campground you can park in if you're not interested in camping.

After parking, I just followed the river upstream on the left side. This required a lot of hiking up and down side canyons entering the main canyon, which was very time consuming. I also found it hard to follow too closely to the river for much of the hike due to how steep and rocky the sides of the canyon were. So I viewed most of it from above, just dropping down every once in a while when I found a way down. Because of this, I didn't make it nearly as far as I had planned. I only made it to the confluence with Juniper Creek before I decided to head back.

Hiking in the end of November, I didn't have too much daylight, and the water was too icy for me to want to wade in it. Hiking this in Spring or Summer would be much easier, as you could always wade through the water when the canyon walls became too steep to hike along. All in all, I was impressed with what I saw. This is a canyon I decided to try out after seeing how deep it was on Google Maps. I only scratched the surface of it on this trip, and already have a couple return trips planned for the future. I didn't see anyone else here, and I doubt it ever gets many visitors.

I tried this canyon again in May, when the water was warm enough to wade through, and this saved me a lot of time traveling up the canyon. The river was generally ankle-to-thigh deep, with a few deep pools that I was able to walk around on the sides of the canyon. It actually felt really nice wading up the stream. After about two miles I tried to hike up a really deep, narrow canyon on the right (second image from the top). However, it wasn't as easy to hike up as I had hoped. There were some deep pools and climbing, and it was choked with bushes. I ended up having to go around a few sections, which was very strenuous and time-consuming. The parts I did make it down to the canyon floor for, however, were impressive.

I plan to come back here at least one more time to check out a section of the canyon that looks like it could be really interesting. In looking at satellite images, there appears to be a lot of hoodoos and possibly some arches in a section about six miles upstream from that campground. For this trip I would just travel above the canyon on the right to save time.