Are You Ok, sir?

I’ve always been enchanted by Highway 17, the thirty-three mile drive from Banks to Lowman, Idaho. For the first ten miles the South Fork of the Payette River runs hard along the highway. Pine-covered walls rise nearly straight up, and at the base Idaho’s batholith is revealed. Dark granite stripped bare by a river that mercilessly pulls sediment and everything else off its surface.

For decades I dreamed of photographing it. I waited until I had the time, the camera, and the skill. In 2021, I stopped waiting.

I made ten visits that summer. There’s not much room to work between the highway and the river. The road builders were efficient, pushing their path as close to the water as they could. So I squeezed behind the guardrail and the river. To an oncoming driver it looked much more perilous than it was.

Some of them stopped. “Are you Ok, sir?”

On foot, you can go more places than you’d think.