My First Snowshoe Experience

It's great having a ski resort right in your backyard. Brian and I for the second time braved the wicked and nauseating 16 mile drive up to Bogus Basin that includes 162 switchbacks and 3,000 feet of elevation gain with little or no guardrails.

Boise Fact #1

Why is Idaho known for potatoes? Because of J.R. Simplot. Simplot innovated the use of chemical fertilizer as a substitute for crop rotation; he was an early user of the electric potato sorter; and he went on to advance the possibilities in new product development, economies of scale, vertical integration, and company research.

Today, his company is the largest supplier of french fries to McDonald's. In 2006 he was estimated to be the 80th richest person in America, with $3.2 billion. At 98, he is the oldest living billionaire on the Forbes 400.

Above, you can see his signature hilltop home that he and his wife donated to the State of Idaho for use as a governor's mansion.

But once we safely arrived, we put on all our ski gear and got fitted in snowshoes. Minutes later we were following what I called the "Tiki Tour" and snowshoed our way through the night up and around the mountainsides. Even after I spent the afternoon reading my photography book, setting my camera for night pictures, and practicing taking pictures in the dark, I still didn't get good pictures of us snowshoeing.

If you had a pair of night goggles on - this is what Brian and I would've looked like.



Overall, snowshoeing is fun and at the top of a mountain it is very windy!

Boise Fact #2

Why is it called Bogus Basin? Back in the 1880s, when two prospectors loaded a shotgun with a few dollars' worth of gold dust and blasted it into the walls of a worthless cave near Shafer Butte. They galloped down to Boise where they slammed their "find" on a local bar and sold shares in the "mine" to gullible patrons. By the time the new owners realized they had been fleeced, the swindlers had disappeared.