Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Another tradition gone - the end of the Boville run

I was at the Univ of Idaho in the late 60's. For a generation before and since then, the Boville run was a tradition that few college students missed.
The smart ones had a designated driver. Some groups didn't. The idea was to go through the University's home town of Moscow and drink 1 beer in each bar. Then head east through the towns of Troy, Deary, etc. and finally to the tiny logging town of Boville, stopping at each bar for 1 beer. Then on around the loop of other tiny towns on the way back to Moscow. At the end, each person had downed 20 beers. At that time the driver was presented with a case of beer for his own use (the standard case in those days contained 24 beers). Needless to say, only a total fool volunteered his car for the run.

But, alas, all traditions end some time. Many of the bars along the way have disappeared, largely due to the shutdown of logging by the feds. Also, Moscow has grown considerably and has plenty of bars without making the run. The town at the far end of the loop, Boville, is close to a ghost town now, with it's total reason for existance, logging, gone.
Here's an article for those who remember the Boville Run.

The End of the Bovill Run
Randy Stapilus


When I attended the University of Idaho back in the 1970s, one of the semi-illicit student activities was something called the Bovill Run.

It was a typically stupid college-kid drinking challenge. The idea was that a carload of kids would cruise east to Troy, consume drinks at a local drinking establishment, head further east and stop at Deary and Helmer, and northeast to Bovill, rinsing and repeating at each location, then on northerly to Princeton and Potlatch, and any other alcohol purveyors in eastern Latah County, on the way back to Moscow. Left unclear was whether continued drinking at Moscow establishments constituted part of the challenge but, supposedly, the number of drinking places visited numbered around 20.

I�ve been told that the Bovill Run was abandoned some years back. That certainly would have been a good thing.

There may be a dark echo to that in the closure of many of the small-town businesses � bars among them � in many of these small resource-industry communities. Not, of course, that the �run� was any sort of significant economic driver, but in the fact that the economy in these communities has fallen to the point that the escapade isn�t even doable now.

The thought was prompted by a story last week in the Lewiston Tribune about the Idaho Foodbank�s mobile pantry, which includes Bovill among its stops. It operates out of a central office at Lewiston.

Most people in larger communities wouldn�t spend much thought on the arrival of a pickup truck hauling a trailer containing food. In Bovill, it�s a big deal. The last of the long-vaunted bars in the small timber community closed six months ago, and that had been the last place in Bovill where residents could buy basic foods and supplies.

The pastor at the local Presbyterian Church was quoted as saying, �I don�t think you can over-estimate the importance of the mobile pantry coming to this community.�

Once a hot timber town with a fine hotel and even an opera house, Bovill became so lively a century ago that its namesake Hugh Bovill reportedly quit it with his family for quieter environs. The decades since have not been kind. Bovill is a lot like many small towns in Idaho, and beyond. Its population estimated at 305 at the century�s turn was down to 265 in 2010.

The trend line is not good. Nor has it been good for many of the other small rural communities in the area.

Maybe a new sort of regional connection, one geared toward building social and economic ties between regional centers like Moscow and the smaller communities in the area is needed. As essential as the Foodbank�s mobile pantry has been, the answers toward large-scale help for the area may come from other directions, something to bring prosperity to the area.

Idaho�s rural places have, in so many areas, the great advantage of beauty and reasonably easy access. Bovill, in far eastern Latah County, is only about a half-hour from Moscow, close enough to forge connections. Costs would be low and opportunities considerable for people who might like to work in more remote places.

If it�s not to be the end of the run for Bovill, maybe we need a new kind of Bovill Run.

for over 30 years here in Gainesville, we have had the Gator Stomp. Sometimes billed as the world's biggest pub crawl. No signs of ever letting up

Used to do a thing we called a suicide run. Starting from the West side of Portland we'd work our way East hitting every gun shop. After hitting the last one in Gresham, we'd turn around and hit every strip club all the way back.

Expensive but fun.

some of our small mtn towns that grew up around logging have converted to attracting tourists from the flat-lands. more bars, food and gas stations now than ever.

the trees aren't logged much anymore, just left to blow down in the storms. but clipping the flat-landers has become quite popular with the locals.

You bloody Yanks are so much better at this sort of thing than we are, we just have the hot run, where you pull into a shearing shed in January and spend the next four of the most miserable months of your life bent over dirty, stinking, kicking, mongrel sheep.

I much prefer your version.