In the first days of March 1955, while the mountains were still deep in winter, two young men from Arbon Valley farms hauled a loaded toboggan up into Garden Creek basin, a small high valley in the range that divides Arbon Valley from Marsh Valley, and lived there in a tent for six days. They were Rodney Smith, 18, and Calvin Williams, 21. On Sunday, March 20, the Idaho Sunday Journal, the Sunday edition of the Pocatello Idaho State Journal, ran their trip under a banner headline across the top of page 10, with photographs, a hand-drawn map and a long story.
The paper put the basin about 10 miles northwest of Arimo. By its description the basin was a high pocket of roughly eight square miles near 6,000 feet, with stands of pine and aspen, and apart from the odd sheepherder or hunter almost no one went there. Scout, Old Tom and Scab mountains hem it in, with Garden Creek Gap at its southern end. That gap was on the way over the range from the Arbon side toward Robin and McCammon. In the hard winter of 1948–49 Ross Saxton, a rancher at Rattlesnake, very probably in the Crystal country, had skied as far as the gap on his way to McCammon and, stopped there by snow, telephoned that about 60 families in his area had had no new supplies for three weeks.
The two started from the home of Calvin's uncle, Stan Williams, near Robin on the Marsh Valley side. The story says they set out on March 3; a caption says they left Robin on skis on March 4, and the likeliest reading is that they met at the uncle's house on the evening of the 3rd and started the next morning. On the evening they gathered there, a heavy storm blew in. Every relative and friend who knew of the plan, Uncle Stan among them, pleaded with the pair to stay home and told them the mountains would kill them. Daylight brought no break in the weather and a reading far below zero, and they went anyway.
Before leaving they had gone to experienced mountain men for both equipment and know-how, and their outfit came to about 300 pounds: tent, bedding, food, cooking things, first-aid supplies, cameras, field glasses, snowshoes, rifles and axes. Six miles of uphill pulling brought them to a lookout over the basin. Beyond the rim the route dropped for the most part, ending at a warm spring near the head of a creek the paper calls Marley Creek, where a stand of dry trees sheltered the tent from the wind.
The first night they set the tent up without clearing the snow beneath it, and the cold kept them awake. The next night they did it differently: they dug out a patch to bare dirt, kept fires going on it until the ground was warm, spread pine boughs and sagebrush beneath the bedding, and took to bed a green aspen log they had heated in the flames and scraped. That night, by the paper's account, they slept well.
From camp they went out each day. Elk let them come within about 200 yards, and the animals looked to have come through the winter well. Field glasses brought into view about 50 deer on a ridge of Old Tom, a lynx trailing behind. For three days they tried to get near the lynx, which carried a $25 bounty, and never managed it. One aspen felled for the fire turned out to hold a hive, and they let the bees be.
They also measured the snow. With a ski stood on end they took depths wherever they went, and in the canyons they judged the drifts at about 60 feet. Calvin filled an empty corn can with snow and set it by the fire; when it melted, the can was half full of water. The pair judged that a better sign for irrigation water than anything the government's snow surveyors had put out, and they returned counting on a well-watered season. That was their own rough test, not an official measurement.
A warm spell on March 10 started to weaken the crust, and rather than risk the heavy toboggan sinking in, they broke camp and headed out. The Garden Creek dam, reached about five o'clock, was as far as the toboggan got that day. They abandoned it there with a plan to come back for it and went on without it to Uncle Stan's, exhausted.
The papers read for this post say nothing more about either young man: not which Arbon Valley families they came from, and not what became of them. It is not known who took the photographs, though the two carried cameras.
On this site: Garden Creek Gap appears in the story of the Rattlesnake rancher who skied out in the blizzard of February 1949. That same winter, Arbon and Crystal ranchers had organized winter patrols against thieving, planning to go on skis if the snow required it. For the valley itself, see the Arbon area page.
The story as reported
Idaho Sunday Journal, March 20, 1955, page 10. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Two young men from Arbon Valley farms came home from six days in the snowbound Garden Creek basin in early March expecting a good irrigation season.
Garden Creek basin sits roughly 10 miles northwest of Arimo in the range separating Arbon Valley from Marsh Valley, covering about eight square miles at around 6,000 feet.
A blizzard was starting when Rodney Smith, 18, and Calvin Williams, 21, gathered at the place of Calvin's uncle, Stan Williams, near Robin to begin the trip. Relatives and friends warned them they might not survive and tried to talk them out of it. By morning nothing had improved: Calvin put the wind at about 45 miles an hour and visibility at some 30 feet, and it was 19 below zero. They left on skis anyway, betting that the weather would soon improve.
Their 300-pound outfit rode on a toboggan. To get a grip on the climb they roughlocked their skis: cable from the toboggan bound each boot to its ski, and the knot on the underside caught the snow and kept the ski from slipping. For warmth they dressed in layers, with doubled wool underwear and wool socks, a pair of sweatshirts apiece, trousers and jackets that cut the wind, and leather boots inside rubber overshoes.
They made camp beside a warm spring near the head of Marley Creek, where the snow was waist deep. The first night, spent on top of the snow, was a cold one; for the next, they scraped down to dirt, built fires to heat the ground, and made a mattress of pine boughs and sagebrush. A green aspen log, charred in the fire and scraped clean of bark, went into the bed as a warmer. Calvin called it "the best doggone bed-warmer you'll ever find."
Rod cooked breakfast, including sourdough pancakes and coffee brewed with a pinch of wood ashes.
Heading out one day toward Old Tom Mountain, they got within about 200 yards of a band of 20 elk, and on that mountain's south ridge they saw some 50 deer with a lynx following. The $25 bounty on the lynx kept them on its trail for three days without success; the tracks, they said, were "big as a pumpkin." An aspen they cut down held a hive they reckoned at about 2,000 bees, which they left in peace.
The youths reported drifts they estimated at 60 feet in the canyons. When Calvin melted a corn can full of snow, half the can was left as water. The two took that as better news than the official snow surveys had been reporting.
By March 10 their sourdough starter had gone flat in the cold and the snow was turning soft enough to bury the toboggan, so they started back. Around 5 p.m. they got as far as the Garden Creek dam. Too tired to go farther with it, they left the toboggan there to collect the next day and went on to Uncle Stan's without it.