Selway Day 0: Paradise campground

Sparky and I took off for the put-in a day early as was mentioned previously. We wanted the option of just lounging around and taking our time rigging Sparky's cataraft without the rush that always seems to accompany a launch.

We finished up the grocery shopping in Missoula and took off south to find the put-in. We anticipated a much worse road than what we found: there were definitely some bad dirt areas, but I was surprised by how much of the road was paved. As in most of it.

This is the view from Nez Perce pass (paved over the top):

Paradise campground was anything but. While it was a nice little campground, it had several bajillion mosquitoes that were seemingly intent on making a meal out of me. I was getting bit even through what I considered to be thick clothing. Even after spraying myself with copious amounts of DEET, I still seemed to be getting chawed on.

And don't even start me about the snakes (too late). I thought there weren't supposed to be snakes in Paradise. In the morning I went looking for some water to fill my bottle, and there was a big old rattlesnake right in the road, all shaking his tail at me and all. It was disturbing. One of the other campers said (after we set up our camp) that he saw a rattlesnake in our campsite the day before.

During the day and a half that we were there, I saw four snakes. The one rattlesnake, one bullsnake (couldn't fool me), one garter snake, and one snake that I'm going to call a "poopsnake."

I've never seen a snake like the poopsnake before: it was truly the color of poo, it was about 15" long, definitely not a pit viper, and had a very stubby tail. Perhaps the tail had been eaten by something else, but it didn't look like it. I wish I had gotten a picture of it; I'm sure it's a new species, though I'm not sure I'd want to have a snake that for the life of me looked like a turd named in my honor.

After doing about 5 minutes of online research, it turns out that it wasn't a new species. Surprisingly, it isn't called a "poopsnake" either. Apparently it was a "Rubber Boa." Which doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as well as "poopsnake." But I digress.

So I spent the morning (after pissing off the rattlesnake) rigging Sparky's cat while she slept in taking full advantage of our leisure time.

Paradise campground is located about .25 mile from the Selway river up a large tributary called White Cap creek. There were a couple of obvious places in the campground that could be used for launching boats, and we were camped by one, so I took Sparky's cat and floated it down to the main put-in on the Selway. There was a commercial group putting on that day, so I actually made landfall under the bridge over the White Cap, where there was a much better eddy anyways.

Sparky surprised me by showing up in our truck at that time and offered to drive me a couple miles up the Selway so I could float back down. How could I refuse that? So we went upriver about two and a half miles and I floated back.

The Selway is one of the most regulated floatable rivers in the U.S. Below the Paradise put-in (and above Selway Falls 47 miles downstream), only one group of floaters is allowed to launch each day of the summer season (May 15th through July 31st) . Fortunately, the river above the put-in is completely unregulated, so I could do anything I want there. Like float.

It was a nice little class IV section of river with a couple of very cool narrow canyon sections:



Anyway, that was fun.

Later, some of the other crew showed up with the rest of the gear. We hunkered down for the night to get ready for the real work of rigging the boats the following day for our launch.