Banks and the North Fork Payette

Banks is hardly a town — a store, a river access, a highway junction — but on a summer weekend it is one of the busiest places in the Boise National Forest. It sits where the South Fork of the Payette, coming down from the Sawtooths past Lowman, meets the North Fork coming down from Cascade, and the rafters and kayakers who fill the put-ins have friendlier water below the confluence to choose from.

The reason serious paddlers come is upstream. For about fifteen miles above Banks, the North Fork drops beside Highway 55 through a narrow canyon of blasted rock in continuous Class V rapids, falling more than a hundred feet a mile. Local boaters first ran its last two and a half miles in 1975, and the whole stretch was first paddled in 1977. The crux is Jacob's Ladder, a half-mile cataract visible from a highway pullout, followed at once by the maze of holes called the Golf Course. When the North Fork Championship is held, in June, the world's best whitewater kayakers race a giant slalom through them while crowds line the road.

Watch it from the pullouts; the North Fork above Banks is for experts only. Below the confluence the Main Payette runs gentler water down toward Horseshoe Bend, and outfitters at Banks and along the highway run trips on it and on the South Fork. The Banks-Lowman road climbs east from here up the South Fork canyon to Lowman and Kirkham.