Short films, shot and told from the farm — earthquakes that moved mountains, copper boomtowns, gold dredges, ghost towns, and a river that vanishes into the desert. Forty seconds at a time.
At six minutes past eight, on the morning of October 28th, 1983, the ground beneath this valley tore open. The Borah Peak earthquake — magnitude 6.9, the largest in Idaho's recorded history — dropped the valley floor and lifted Mount Borah a foot higher into the sky. The scar it left still runs for more than twenty miles along the range. We named this place for that mountain — a peak that earned its height in a single morning.
Mackay was born in 1901 — built from nothing to serve the copper pouring out of the White Knob Mountains. It took the name of John W. Mackay, the silver king who funded the mine, though they say he never once set foot here. For nearly fifty years the mountain gave up its copper, carried down on a six-mile aerial tramway of ore buckets strung across the slope. The mines fell quiet in 1949. The valley they left behind is the one we call home.
An hour north of Mackay, two ghost towns sit along the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River. Gold was struck in 1873, and the rush built Bonanza, then Custer just up the road. At its peak Custer held six hundred people. Then came a fire, a played-out mine, and by 1911 it stood empty. The weathered cabins still stand today — and our whole county takes its name from a single mine in those hills.
Along the Yankee Fork sits a machine the size of a building — a gold dredge. It floated in a pond of its own making and ate its way down the river for twelve years. From 1940 to 1952 it chewed through five and a half miles of riverbed — six million cubic yards of rock — pulling out close to a million dollars in gold. The long piles of tumbled stone it left behind still line the river today, a monument to how far people will go for what's buried in these mountains.
The Big Lost River begins high in the Pioneer Mountains and runs right past the farm — and then it does something rivers aren't supposed to do. It vanishes. Its waters sink into the aquifer beneath the desert and never reach the sea. That's how it earned its name. The same river that waters this farm slips beneath the desert downstream — and is never seen again.
This county didn't exist until 1881. When it was carved out of the Idaho Territory, the settlers named it for the General Custer Mine — the gold strike that had pulled them into these mountains. The first outsiders had come decades before: fur traders in 1818, then Michel Bourdon, who found the Challis country in 1822. Mining built this place. Ranching kept it. Today the valley is quieter — and we think that's exactly its gift.