North America’s deepest river gorge sits right in our backyard. Hells Canyon — carved by the Snake River along the Idaho/Oregon border — drops 7,993 feet from the rim of the Seven Devils Mountains to the river below. That’s deeper than the Grand Canyon, and for most of human history, it was considered completely impassable by boat. I have been fortunate enough to raft the canyon seven times so far. Two as a passenger, twice in an inflatable kayak, and three times in my cataraft. We did a trip over the weekend, just five of us in 4 boats. There is a lot of benefits to a small trip including the fact that we all fit on a single trailer.
The Canyon That Defeated Everyone
The Nez Perce people lived in and around the canyon for thousands of years. They fished its legendary salmon runs, hunted bighorn sheep on the canyon walls, and left behind hundreds of pictographs and petroglyphs — some of which you can still see today at places like Buffalo Eddy. But even they didn’t try to navigate the river through the deepest sections. The canyon’s power commanded respect, not conquest.
When European explorers showed up, the canyon humbled them too. In 1806, Sergeant John Ordway of the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the region and turned back, describing “solid and perpendicular rocks which rise to a great hight.” In 1811, the Pacific Fur Company’s Wilson Price Hunt attempted to find a river route to the Columbia — the canyon forced him out. In 1834, Captain Benjamin Bonneville tried again and gave up, though he left behind one of the most quoted descriptions of any landscape in the American West:
“The grandeur and originality of the views presented on every side beggar both the pencil and the pen. Nothing we had ever gazed upon in any region could for a moment compare in wild majesty and impressive sternness.”
During the 1860s gold rush, mining companies actually sent steamboats into the canyon to supply miners. The boats crashed on the rocks. The canyon won.
The First River Runners
The first documented recreational river runners appeared in 1928 — locals or adventurers who pushed into the canyon in wooden boats. Details are sparse; surviving records from that era are thin. What’s clear is that before World War II, running Hells Canyon was a genuine wilderness expedition with no infrastructure, no rescue capability, and no margin for error.
In the decades that followed, jet boats became the primary way to access the canyon. These flat-bottomed, high-powered craft could punch upstream against the current, reaching remote ranches and homesteads that had no road access. Jet boat tours became a fixture of Hells Canyon long before rafting did, and they’re still a big part of canyon tourism today.
Three Dams and a Turning Point
The modern rafting run through Hells Canyon only exists because of — and in spite of — a series of dams built by Idaho Power in the late 1950s and 1960s.
- Brownlee Dam — completed 1958
- Oxbow Dam — completed 1961
- Hells Canyon Dam — completed 1967
The Hells Canyon Dam, 26 miles below Oxbow, became the put-in for what is now the classic rafting run. Below it, 62 miles of free-flowing Snake River cuts through the deepest part of the canyon before opening up downstream. The dam created a defined starting point and regulated flows, essentially building the modern trip.
But it almost went much worse. For years, federal agencies and power companies proposed a Hells Canyon High Dam — a 710-foot wall of concrete that would have drowned the entire canyon under a reservoir. There would have been nothing left to raft.
The fight over the high dam dragged on for decades. The turning point came in 1967 when U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas authored an opinion in Udall v. Federal Power Commission that stopped and questioned additional dam construction, and asked directly whether destroying the river served the public interest. It was a landmark moment — the courts beginning to weigh recreation and wilderness against power generation.
Saving the Canyon
The same year the Hells Canyon Dam was completed, the Hells Canyon Preservation Council was formed to fight for permanent protection. Idaho Senator Frank Church — who had already sponsored both the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 — became the key figure in Congress pushing for the canyon’s protection. Oregon Senator Robert Packwood worked alongside him across the aisle.
The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 included the Snake River in Hells Canyon among its original protected rivers, banning further dam construction in the wild section.
On December 31, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area Act, protecting 652,488 acres and formally establishing the 62-mile wild river corridor that rafters float today. It stands as one of the signal victories of the American conservation movement — a canyon that nearly became a reservoir, saved largely because enough people cared about keeping a wild river wild.
The Rafting Era
With the canyon protected and the put-in established below Hells Canyon Dam, commercial rafting took off in the late 1970s and 1980s. Outfitters built on the model of the nearby Salmon River — Idaho’s “River of No Return” — which had been commercially rafted since the 1950s and 1960s.
By 1982, outfitters like Hells Canyon Raft (the Armacost family operation) were running multi-day trips through the canyon. The route covers the biggest whitewater — Wild Sheep Rapid and Granite Creek Rapid are the headline drops, both Class IV–V at higher flows — along with bighorn sheep on the walls, ancient rock art, remnants of 1880s homesteads, and some of the most remote campsites in the lower 48.
Demand grew fast enough that the Forest Service eventually implemented a permit lottery system for the primary season (Memorial Day through September 10). Hells Canyon is now part of the “Four Rivers Lottery” alongside the Main Salmon, Middle Fork Salmon, and Selway — four of the premier wilderness river experiences in the American West, all managed through Recreation.gov. Permits open March 1 and go quickly.
Why It Matters
The Hells Canyon run is not a casual day trip. The canyon is accessible only by river — no roads, no bridges cross the wild section. Cell service is essentially nonexistent. Medical evacuation is slow and complicated. The water is cold early in the season, the canyon floor hits 100°F in summer, and the rapids that defeated steamboats in the 1860s are still there, just waiting for someone to underestimate them.
That’s also exactly what makes it worth doing. From the put-in below the dam, you’re entering a place that resisted human transit for centuries, nearly disappeared under a reservoir, and survived to become one of the most extraordinary multi-day river trips in North America. The pictographs at Buffalo Eddy were painted by people who lived here thousands of years ago. The stone foundations at Kirkwood Ranch belonged to homesteaders who gave up trying. The bighorn sheep on the walls have been there longer than any of it.
I’ve been on a lot of rivers. Hells Canyon is on the list.
Hells Canyon National Recreation Area is managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Permits for the Snake River through Hells Canyon are available via the Four Rivers Lottery at Recreation.gov.