I heard someone call it the armpit of Idaho.

Opinion?

The Potlatch paper mill there certainly made it a hell hole years ago. The EPA finally forced them to clean it up and it's much better now. You don't drop off Lewiston hill into a fogbank of stench like you used to. I haven't been through there in a long time and can't speak for the current living conditions.

It's central to a lot of great fishing and hunting, just downstream from Hells Canyon. It's the lowest place in Idaho at about 700'. Only 30 miles away, the elevation is about 2200 and it goes up from there.

They grow potatos up there?

Not any potatoes that I’m aware of in the Lewiston area. I live 35 miles from Lewiston up on the Camas Prairie. Mostly wheat, canola, cattle, hay and such.

I go to Lewiston/Clarkston for my shopping. If I had to live in a big town Lewiston wouldn’t be bad. I like our small town though.

Gets a bit warm in the summer. I stepped off a plane there on August 14, 1983 into well over 100 degree temps. Bit of a shock and adjustment for a young Dutch kid fresh off the farm......

I'd rather live in Craigmont..... .

No, Kentucky is nice though.

Might change when they breach the dams!

Rocky , thanks, it would just be a place to live until i can find a town about 1/10th the size of Lewiston.
The rivers there look good -i like to fish/hunt/camp with my little gheenoe boat.
Orofino/Kamiah/etc. are a better fit but it's nearly impossible to find a place to rent until i get settled in.

Mart , are there any ground squirrel shooting spots around the region?

Mtn.Boomer , yes Kentucky is nice especially the Blue Grass Region. Plus folks there can connect the dots.

tripod3 , will I be able to walk across the Snake & Clearwater Rivers and not get my bloomers wet ?

ol_mike

Didn't you just recently move to Arkansas, or am I remembering that incorrectly?

I like Lewiston! Reasonably low elevation location, so weather isn't too bad in winter. Furthest inland deep water port in the US, for what it's worth. I think only 10 or so inches of precip per year, IIRC. Home base for a number of ammo manufacturers. You will definitely want a jet boat to access the Snake. You'll see a lot of game, catch a lot of fish. I've thought about moving there myself.

In my short stay there, it looked like a nice town that I could live in. I just have no reason to move. I was disappointed that CCI Speer did not have a factory outlet ammo store.

I like Lewiston well enough. Thats where we went for bar wars, Idaho was 19 to drink if memory serves, we were 21 to drink. Lots of good fishing. Took an eight day canoe trip, deer hunting on Dworshak(sp) Reservoir. Brother and I, we each got our bucks. Thats was a couple decades ago. Nice country lots of good people!

Only thing wrong with Lewiston is heat in the summer. Boise Metro is the armpit thanks to rampant developement and [bleep] moving in.

I have passed through Lewiston once, three years ago. We began to smell the armpit about three miles out of town.

Now I have spent my life in a beet sugar factory. And that ranks right up there with stink production. But the smell of the paper mill was much more prevalent. As the town is located in a narrow hole in the Earth, the stench settled and permeated the entire city.

I would definitely find which is the prevailing wind direction in the city and look for property upwind.

One drive through town and you’ll know why it’s called the armpit of Idaho. Smells like spoiled broccoli.

longarm , howdy , I've been here 3 years 8 months. Pertaining to Arkansas - i moved here contemplating buying 15-20-30 acres of land.
Covid ruined that - land prices sky-rocketed and it still sold. Not very good hunting here, small amount of public land and people come from everywhere to hunt it.

I lived in Meridian, connected to Boise, 07-09 - wow has it grown- subdivisions galore. Started ADA Exteriors construction got it up and going then >Obama did what Democrats do.

Lewiston area -- is a dry heat right?

In the 60's, I went to college in Moscow. Highway 95 went south went through Lewiston. That was before they cleaned up the paper mill...or reconstructed the 'hill'. The hill was 30-40 mph around all the curves. Now you can run it at 70 if you have had power without overheating. Back then, you'd drop down the hill into a solid mass of smog. It was kind of a yellow color and your eyes would water just thinking about it.

Back then there were 3 miserable hills between Moscow and Boise - Lewiston, Whitebird, and Horseshoe Bend. They were all very steep, curvy, and slow. Whitebird was the worst with 21 switchbacks. Passing was impossible on any of them so when you got behind someone slow, you just settled in for a very long ride. Since then, they're rebuilt all 3 hills. That cut 30 to 45 min off the trip from Moscow to Boise. They also bypassed Lawyers Canyon between Lewiston and Grangeville. That stretch of road went through a narrow canyon along a river. In the winter, it was always ice, fog, and deer on the road. The road was narrow and winding. Eventually, they moved the highway up out of the canyon so it now runs along the rim. BIG improvement.

This old photo only shows half the Whitebird switchbacks.



this was the old Lewiston grade. This photo was taken on a windy day that cleared out some of the smog. Most days you couldn't see the bottom like this.

Have you tried the area around mt view AR I really like it there.

I don't know about now but used to be that Lewiston Orchards was a better place to live. It was a little higher and because of the wind, the air was a bit cleaner.

There are ground squirrels from what I’m told. I’ve done little hunting here because my wife cannot be alone for extended periods. Her dementia ties me pretty close to home.

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Geez has it been that long? I remember talking to you about AR some time ago, thought it was more recently. I have a good buddy who lives in Mountain Home and likes it, but to be honest he doesn't do all that much as far as hunting/fishing. I thought it was supposed to be the "Outdoorsman's Paradise" or something??

Has nothing to do with the question, but.....When I lived in south east BC we used to go to Idaho cause of the girls and the bars, then more bars and girls, drinking age was 18, next door in Washington it was 21, this was the biggest problem I had when I was 20.

Rocky,
Whitebird Swtchback reminds me of the road in California- purposely made switchbacks.

Oldagpilot,
I've been through Mountain View it is a nice little town.
I'm planning on trapping & hunting wolves/mountain lions/bears .
Sylamore WMA is big but there's a road cut through every 1/4 - 1/2 mile, you just can't get away from people here. And it's growing fast.

mart , wishing the wife and you the best.
My Mom had dementia then alzheimers- sad bad stuff.

longarm ,

Yep it's flown by, June 2nd @ 5:30pm will be 4 years.
If time doesn't slow down I'm going to die of old age

the good ole days

No it's not!

There's nothing here except fat butted women and moonshine infused banjo pickers who sit on the front porch and play a never ending rendition of Foggy Mountain Breakdown until they collapse on top of the washing machine,...where they lay until they recover,...only to take up the moonshine and the banjo and start all over again.

It never ends!

For Pete's sake,....don't nobody move here. It's hell on Earth!

Minimum drinking age in Idaho was 19, not 18.

Is it still like that around Breeer ?

My mistake, life is full of them lol.

Breeer is the most sophisticated area of the state. The moonshine infused Banjer pickers in Breeer put their shoes on, on Sunday.

Not over around BigHill

Ask me how I know.

Imagine riding a Big Wheel down Big Hill with Foggy Mountain Breakdown playing in the background,...while infused with a copious quantity of Jim Beam.

That's life in Kentucky for a 20 year old man.

It don't get no better, actually.

sounds fun especially with the various substances.
I rode my cousin Kristi's big wheel down BlueShin hill, ohio- they lived right in the middle of the hill. The right side lower pocket on my army surplus coat got under the wheel and burned a big hole in it.

I hung out with some Jackson County people for a good while. They're nuts. They showed me that I was nuts too.

I'm pretty much over it this days, however.

I wouldn't.

If ever I were to move to Idaho, I'd look strongly at Payette. (pop about 7500 ) Or better yet, Yellow Pine (pop a few dozen I think.if you don't mind it a bit colder and snowier. Handy to Frank Church Wilderness, etc.

If in Yellow Pine, all you need is a saddle horse and a pack mule and you are good to go! Payette is maybe 150 miles away, thru some great country. Buy a horse trailer....

Lots of other good places- Sand Point, St Maries, McCall, Wallace, or more remote Calder, Red Ives,

I don't much care for gobs of people, myself.

Yellow Pine…. If I were to go remote, I’d go Elk City way before Yellow Pine.

Cottonwood would be a decent compromise. Grangeville is, too, but lost a bit of it’s mojo since the mill closed. Not easy to make a living in any of that country. If it was, their biggest export wouldn’t be their kids…..

Lewiston is not "hot"........13 days over 100 degrees last summer

https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/lewiston/yearly-days-of-100-degrees

Not sure where you are, but to compare to Lewiston, Little Rock had 15 days of 100 F or better

https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/little-rock/yearly-days-of-100-degrees

I can guarantee you the 100F in Lewiston is lot more pleasurable than 100F in Arkansas.

If you plan on renting until you find something to purchase further out, Lewiston might be tolerable enough. I lived about 50 miles from there for 7 work seasons or so. Decent healthcare at the time (I left in 2017) , I had a minor surgery while up there, good dermatologist, decent urologist.

No fee for parking at the airport when I was there. Could have driven the 2+ hrs and flown out of Spokane but then would have had to pay for parking. Lewiston connects with Boise and Portland/Seattle depending on where you're headed. And TSA was basically a 5 minute wait.

When and if the dams come down, should the rivers return to the pre dam conditions, you likely could wade across the Snake in more than a few places. Pretty sure at the right time of year you can wade the Clearwater most of the year once you're above the high water line outside of Lewiston.

Couple of folks here check in now and again that live in/nearby Lewiston. Maybe they'll post some info for you.

Not sure what you like in restaurant food, but in my experience Lewiston was pretty basic. Down near the Les Schwab there is/was a decent Mexican place. Used to be a decent burger place near Lolo Sporting Goods as I recall. As for fine dining???????????????? Here's a clue, I wanted veal for my birthday one year, went to a well known Italian place there, didn't see it on the menu. Asked the 20 something waitress if they had veal perhaps...........her answer "What's veal?"

I knew folks lived on the WA side of the border near there that hunted ID most years if that tells you anything. And they usually did pretty well. Lots of quail, pheasant, and chuckar if your willing to hunt the walls of the Canyon. Huns up in the farmland too.

Payette's closer to 8500 now. Housing's got so expensive in Boise/Nampa/Caldwell that people are moving farther and farther out. Prices are rising there, too.

From looking around on google earth it looks like the sage brush gives way to more wooded areas and crop fields. I like the woods.

My wife and I moved north east of Lewiston after spending 7 yrs in town. Any Questions feel free to PM

Rocky - I've been to Horseshoe Bend >>>steep uphill in a work truck towing a trailer.
Coasting down it you could probably go 100mph.

Hi Shag

I mentioned McCall quite a while back and we talked about it.

One thing that has held me up on moving is finding a self storage unit. Nearly impossible in Idaho it seems.
I put my name on several lists and one came open in Weiser after around three months ........
Find an apartment - can't find storage or verse visa.
Seems to have gotten a bit better but not much.

We are in the outskirts of Emmett and the wife and I like it here. We are close enough to Boise, Meridian for major medical and helping out the kids over the hill.
We dont have tons of traffic and dont see to much riff raff all though I know they are here.
We do have a couple Mt Lions hanging around and a few
Rattle snakes that needed killing.
If it wasn’t for the kids and grandkids I would be in Wyoming.

I do not understand why one would pass through HSB en-route from Boise to Id 95.

Yes Whitebird and Lewiston Hills were both MFers before they were rebuilt. More so with snow pack. I saw the new road being built at Whitebird in about 1973 while we were traversing the switchbacks in a Chrysler town and Country wagon w/ a 440 loaded full of people and gear pulling a twenty foot RV. We were on the way to Elk City for a Sheep hunt.

My Uncle used to run from Treasure Valley to N Idaho once or twice a week pulling mobile homes in the sixties and seventies. His wife drove pilot car for him. She would have to drive to the top of the hill and stop all traffic while he negotiated the switchbacks with a 12x60 foot trailer. I can not even imagine.

The common answer around here is containers. twenty foot , thirty foot, forty foot, even forty eight foot by eight. Rent or purchase. Weather tight, secure, store it in RV parking if you have to. Have it moved to a new location as you move.

Certainly a ton of great country and out of doors doings in the immediate vicinity. Can't speak to the town itself. If the paper mill aroma has been arrested then it might be just fine.

Used to be that US95 from Weiser to New Meadows was a narrow winding road. As bad as Hwy 55 was, it was still better than 95. Since then, they've improved 95 considerably.

The summer after I graduated from high school in '66, I worked for a spray company in Boise, spraying yards, etc. My truck was an old beater with worn out brakes. The boss was too cheap to put new brakes on it. It got scary driving in the hills around Boise. Then he said I was to go do a job in Horseshoe Bend. I flat refused. I said I wasn't driving that truck over that hill until he got the brakes fixed. He didn't say anything but that coming Saturday he took my truck and went to do the job himself. Come Monday, the truck was in the shop getting new brakes. I guess he had a wild ride off that hill with 500 gal of sloshing water and no brakes.

Idaho has been badly in need of a fast north-south highway for 100 years. There's simply no place to put one. It's a narrow strip through canyons with Hells Canyon to the west and high, steep mountains to the east. The 150 miles from Boise to Riggins is impossible. From Riggins to Lewiston is better but still not easy for building a freeway.

There’s plenty of room for a freeway, it will just be costly. Drive around the mountains of Germany and Switzerland, and you realize you can put a flat highway anywhere…..for a price.

I think the best things about aging for the wife and I. No need for any kind of TV to speak of. Documentary stuff like You Tube/ Prime if its dark outside and we have to. And the fact that we have about zero desire to eat out anymore so to speak.

Can you imagine what the environmentalists would do to a proposal for a freeway through Banks Canyon?

Wow, that's saying something as McCall to New Meadows is no picnic either.

It is one thing on a bright summer day, another in inclement weather.

We will occasionally make the run from home to Weiser, New Meadows, McCall, Banks, Lowman, Idaho City, Boise, to home in a day. Pretty country.

I don’t understand why folks differentiate between TV and internet streamers. It’s a virtue signal. Period.

Y'all do not need a "fast north-south highway" if you are at all interested in keeping Idaho as Idaho.

Ah yes, the good 'ole days, and yes it was 19 not 18.

I was a Washington State resident in my teens (Walla Walla), and a bunch of us idiots would make the 2 hour drive to either Lewiston or Moscow to go to the bars.

Rathskellers was one of my faves, got kicked out of there more times than I can remember.

Kinda stupid in retrospect, drive that far, get shítfaced, then drive back. SMH

Of course, we were responsible youts - the designated driver wouldn't get nearly as shítfaced as the rest of us. (And that was long before the term "DD" was even coined.) We were pioneers, I guess.

Playboy magazine used to have a drinking rating on college towns all over the country. They'd count the bars and the students and come up with a list of the highest drinking colleges in the country. U of I was at the top year after year. It was a farce, though. UI had maybe 5000 students back then while Wash. State, which was only 10 miles away, had several times that many. Since Idaho's beer drinking age was 19 and WA's age was 21, thousands of WSU students would hit the Moscow bars every weekend night. It really skewed the numbers.
One year, Playboy didn't list Idaho in their ratings. It just wasn't there. Then they said it wasn't fair to rank professionals with amateurs.

Amen

👍

That fast East-West one is bad enough I'd guess.

I was born in Moscow. I had and still have family in Lewiston. We lived in Kendrick, about twenty miles from Lewiston. Lewiston had Lolo Sporting Goods and Fred Warrens. I bought a Ruger 77 from Buttery's Supermarket. A scope came from Payless Drugs. So, fifty-five years ago, I don't know that I would have wanted to live there, but it was a bi-weekly destination. My wife's grandparents lived in the Orchards, as did a bunch of her aunts and uncles. I haven't lived in the area for fifty years, but it still feels like home when I visit. GD

The information for Playboy's 1987 list of party schools had been compiled in 1986 from the reports of Playboy staffers who interviewed campus club leaders, dorm rush chairmen, fraternity presidents and other campus social studs at more than 250 schools nationwide. Which leads us straight into the legend which has sprung up around this famed list:

Then there's the computer bulletin board-fueled story about the magazine (usually Playboy) that was ranking the Top 10 Party Schools in the country. Students at the University of Wisconsin were taken aback when their school didn't rate even an honorable mention; after all, everyone knows about the legendary cheesehead antics that go on in Madison. But when the kids contacted the magazine, they were told: "We don't rank professionals."

Gentle souls that they are, Playboy referenced this bit of folklore (a charming bit of blarney which been told about any number of schools, cheese-enhanced and otherwise, for many years prior to 1987) and did their best console those who were left off the January 1987 compilation by stating, "If your school isn't listed, it's probably because we didn't include professionals."

It cracks me up. "get off mah lawn!"

I grew up in Pullman in the 70's and Lewiston was always stinky but I went back in 2018 and it didn't stink anymore. There is a great restaurant called "Sharp's Burger Ranch" and they even have a Jack O'Connor museum. It was surprisingly hot in July even for a visiting Texan. Lewiston is out there and you'll have to travel a ways to get to a big airport or find big city amenities.

We moved to Winchester Id four years ago , great small town . pretty much in the middle between Lewiston and Grangeville. Im about 400 yds to a small lake,great fishing.
From where I came from, this town is like moving to Mayberry !
Im with Valsdad, sure dont need a fast north-south Hiway !!

How are home values in Winchester? Looks like nice country.

If it's the armpit Pocatello is the butthole.

Bb

I always just flew out of Lewiston. Decent number of flights daily and finding one heading to the connecting airport of my choice was never an issue.

The big city amenities are a different deal..................some of us don't need, or necessarily want, them very often, if at all.

Hey, hey, hey! Watch it, buddy! You're in reach..... .

Westman , home prices are high, and not much for sale, except junk .

Dutch, who's that reply for ?

Seems to be the story in a lot of the nicer places,

We are looking for a place to relocate to. Need to flee this [bleep] state we live in now.

Back a few decades I lived in Sandpoint and liked it but way too pricey these days...

BB, you snuck your reply in before that knothead!

geez, all the good guys have left.....

Gotcha,

but I was thinking maybe you were over here delivering materials again and I'd get you a coffee or lunch tomorrow.

I was chukar hunting in Lewiston in 1989.

That was mountain climbing with a shotgun.

Haven’t been to Modoc myself in a few years; it’s my turn to buy lunch next time.

Let me know when you get over this way again for sure.

Bring something to take to the range if you've got the time. We can just eat lunch there. Or, I have enough crap we can play with.