It was a very special Saturday evening May 16. We spent 7.5 hours driving the Corn Creek Road from North Fork, Idaho to Corn Creek at the edge of the Frank Church Wilderness. It's a 94 mile round trip and it was awesome. We returned to North Fork and checked into the River's Fork Lodge about 5 pm. At 5:30 pm there was a knock at the door and it was John Goodman. He was very happy to learn about the certificates. (See original blog post below.) We grabbed our cameras and went over to the new monument to present John with the certificates. It was a special moment for all of us.
John told us some stories that weren't in the newspaper article. The stories were incredible. They are too long for this blog post. However, we going to make some webpages for this project and put them in our "Salmon Volunteers" website discussed below.
The upshot of the evening is that there will be a formal dedication on August 15. We agreed to help John get this event organized. We will come back here to the River's Fork Inn on August 14 so we can help with the pre-event logistics. There will be a lot of the usual dignitaries and some Lewis & Clark re-enactors. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribe has agreed to give a Native American blessing.
Get this--while talking we realized that Old Toby is almost certainly the very first "retired & senior volunteer" ever to have had documented volunteer service in Area VI! HA!
As we said in our opening line--it was a very special evening and we savored every moment in the fading evening light where the North Fork meets the Main Salmon River.
