SALMON VOLUNTEERS! is up & running

(See latest update posted Sunday, May 24 at end of this post.)

Whew. It took a week but we finally got the SALMON VOLUNTEERS! web project up and running. We made single webpages for all of our Salmon area RSVP partners: The Sacajawea Center, Steele Memorial Medical Clinic, Hospice of Salmon Valley, Discovery Care Centre, Pioneer Primary School, Salmon Public Library, Rags & Wags Thrift Store, EICAP and the Salmon-Challis National Forest. We are using the existing webpages for the Salmon Valley and South Lemhi Senior Citizens Centers.

Our goal was to get this project up and running BEFORE Memorial Day weekend. We really came down to the wire as it's 3 pm and time to leave the office for the holiday.

We've noticed on our website statistical monitoring software that action has already picked up to the SALMON VOLUNTEERS! webpages. We will put some stats here on the blog at the end of the month.

We had some real nice comments about this project already so we are encouraged to think in terms of spreading the idea to other areas. We've already set up a page called CUSTER VOLUNTEERS! We eventually hope to create similar projects for the other counties: Butte, Clark, Fremont, Teton, Madison, Jefferson and Bonneville.

We will be continually adding stuff to the SALMON VOLUNTEERS! website. We don't intend for a nano-second to let it get stale and languish. We really have high hopes for this project. The classified ad began running May 21 and this it's a perfect way to generate interest using Old School printed newspaper to bring interest to New School cyberspace. Time will tell and we shall see. Have a great Memorial Day weekend.

OK, here's the latest updates--they're GOOD! For starters, we've clawed our way back to the top of the "Google Game." That's right, the SALMON VOLUNTEERS! project now comes in #2 when using the search string: salmon idaho volunteer. That's impressive! Secondly, we checked our website statistics this morning and the SALMON VOLUNTEERS! project is really getting some traffic. In just a few short days it has muscled its way into three of the top four page rankings on the website. Likewise, it's accounting for a whopping 33% of total May page views already. That's VERY impressive! Stay tuned. (9:22 am, May 24)

More on Old Toby & Goodmans

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.