The Engine

I’ve seen it my entire life.

On trips to Lucky Peak Reservoir, or heading up to Idaho City or Grimes Creek to camp, the Boise River Diversion Dam was always a familiar landmark. All those years, I only ever noticed its spillway, the river tumbling down it in a broad, white sheet that looked like a waterfall.

Then one morning, I set out to photograph the black basalt cliffs popular with climbers above the river. Standing at the Oregon Trail overlook in East Boise, I looked down at the dam and stopped.

I saw what I had never noticed from the highway: a massive canal peeling off the southwest shoulder of the river.

The New York Canal.

Named for its original East Coast investors, it was completed in 1908 to divert spring runoff out of the river and send it across the dry, dusty desert south and west of town. 

From this headgate, the canal runs forty miles to Lake Lowell, shedding water along the way into a web of laterals and ditches that feed the farmland.

This canal grew the valley. And here it sits, quietly doing its job, more than a hundred years later.

All those years, I thought I was looking at a dam. 

I was looking at an engine.