It was a miracle Jeff Landers was there at all. He’d just finished a slicey lap on the South Fork Payette River when Micah Barker caught up to him late that August afternoon, and that was on top of two sections of the North Fork he’d run earlier in the day. He was bushed, but despite a 30-year age difference—Jeff is 58, Micah is 28—Micah is his all-time favorite paddling partner.
“I told Micah I’ll go get on any section of the North Fork you want,” Jeff says. As Micah weighed the options, Jeff’s wife, Sarah, spoke up in favor of the fastest. Just do a Lower Five, she said. I’ll run shuttle and we’ll go eat at the Dirty Shame, she said, name-checking a boater bar almost as legendary as the North Fork itself.
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The Lower Five miles of the North Fork Payette is a slightly tamer version of the class V test piece just upstream. Jeff and Micah had run it together hundreds of times, but in all their years paddling the stretch, Micah had never once surfed the little wave between Juicer and Crunch. This time he did.
As Micah windmilled to catch the wave, Jeff looked for a spot to wait. Most boaters would have chosen the broad, calm eddy on the left, but traffic was bumper to bumper on Idaho State Highway 55, the slender two-lane road that snakes for miles along the North Fork, and Jeff likes to be seen. He whipped into a smaller eddy on river right…