Special Areas

The Salmon Field Office encompasses many impressive and nationally-significant scenic and cultural landscapes, including three National Trails and an interpretative Cultural/Education Center. While exploring this area, you will follow Idaho’s rich historic roots to discover the birthplace of Sacajawea, walk in the footsteps of the Agaidika people, and travel the path of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition. Visitors willing to face the challenges of this area’s high elevations and rugged terrain will be rewarded with breathtaking views. 

The 50-mile stretch of the Upper Salmon River (“River of No Return”) offers a diversity of recreational opportunities, and provides the chance to experience surrounding landscapes varying from narrow bedrock gorges with roaring rapids to broad grassy plains fringed with rustling cottonwoods. The ecosystems of the region converge to provide habitat for bighorn sheep, deer, elk, and a variety of raptors. The Upper Salmon River has been home to Native Americans for millennia, and conceals prehistoric pithouses, pictographs, rock shelters, and other cultural evidence from more than 10,000 years of occupation. Evidence shows that Shoshonean (Numic) speakers inhabited this area and took advantage of the river’s rich fish and wildlife resources for hundreds of generations before Euroamericans began settling the region in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.