Idaho, An Enigma

  Idaho remains one of the most unknown states to Americans. About the only thing most people know about it is Boise, the Sun Valley Ski Resort and, of course, the world famous potatoes that are grown in profusion there. It oftens gets confused with "Ohio" or "Iowa."  One time, when  I worked at the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, I had a coworker from Idaho. After a guest noticed from the coworkers name tag that he was from Idaho, the guest asked him  " I really love Idaho potatoes, but can you please tell me which side of the Mississippi River your state is on and what states does it border?"
  Idaho is one of my four favorite states; the others being Arizona, New Mexico and Washington. Idaho has an amazing amount of wilderness. One look at a map of the state will reveal that. The "Big Empty, " as some people call it, occupies the central portion of the state. This is a heavily forested, rugged mountainous area that has no roads whatsoever for a huge area and only primitive dirt tracks or crudely maintained dirt roads in other areas. There are many places in central Idaho where people live in a cabin forty or fifty miles from the nearest road and the only way to shop for groceries is to fly a small, private plane to the nearest town with an airport or to have groceries and mail delivered to them by "bush" plane. When people think of bush planes and bush pilots, they think of Alaska or the Canadian Arctic, which are mostly roadless regions with small towns that rely on bush pilots or hovercraft plying the rivers to deliver supplies to the towns.  Bush planes still do a thriving business in Idaho, although on a lesser scale than in the Arctic regions, because of the sheer remoteness and inaccessibility of huge portions of the state. Many people in these remote cabins in the wilderness have landing strips on or near their property because that is the only connection with the outside world that they have. In other cases, they have groceries and mail flown into them by a bush plane on skis so the plane can land on a nearby lake or river. Central Idaho has a number of fishing lodges or hunting lodges that are only accessible by bush plane, on foot, or by boat if it is located on a lake or river.
  The southwest part of Idaho, most of Owyhee County in fact, is also extremely remote and roadless. This is a desert wilderness instead of a forested one, but it is also very remote . The remoteness of Owyhee County  is borne out by the landing strip for bush planes across the highway from the county courthouse in Murphy, the county seat of Owyhee County.
  These areas, along with other, smaller areas, have only been seen and mapped from airplanes. There are huge areas in Idaho that are still unexplored from ground level.
  Idaho is a place where people who want to live in communion with nature go to build their log cabin in the woods. It is a state where someone can go and live off the land in a primitive setting and have little contact with the outside world.
  Normally, a federally designated wilderness cannot have any "works of man" within its borders, but there are two states in which the sheer immensity and remoteness of the wilderness allows the government to make an exception to this rule--Alaska and Idaho. Wilderness areas in these two states can be accessed by bush planes, private planes and boats with motors because they are so far away from anything that without these vehicles, visititation would be impossible.
  The close proximity of unspoiled wilderness to well populated areas in Idaho is staggering. It is, in fact, the defining quality of life in Idaho!