If yesterday was in the running for the most boring day of the trip, today is on the shortlist for the best. That has nothing to do with the first third or the last third, both of which were fairly mundane road walking through close-cropped wheat fields, with a surprising amount of traffic whipping past on this fall Saturday.
No, it was the second act that did the heavy lifting on this momentous day, as those miles brought me down into the canyon carved out by the Snake River, past Dierkes Lake, around Shoshone Falls, and then westward along the canyon ridge into Twin Falls. If you could only walk one leg of these nearly 5000 miles I’ve now walked in the US, make it this one. It’s not quite the Grand Canyon, but there’s a Starbucks, an IHOP, and a Red Robin at the end, if that helps.
It took a while for early explorers to feast their eyes on this glorious sight. The first documented non-indigenous witness was a Canadian priest, Augustine Blanchet. He tried to call it Canadian Falls, but that wasn’t happening. Instead, his maple-stained nomenclature was supplanted by a military contingent led by Major Osborne Cross in 1849. As they marched through today’s Idaho, surveying the Oregon Trail, a Shoshone source advised them that there was a pretty sweet waterfall just ten miles away, so they made the detour and documented everything they saw. The “Niagara of the West” is actually taller than its namesake, standing 212 feet high. (It’s in the width department that the New York falls dominate, outspanning Idaho’s by a staggering 2600 feet.) Unlike Niagara, though, Shoshone Falls was never besmirched by commercialism, as it was gifted as a public park in 1932 to the city of Twin Falls.
Twin Falls might be most famous, though, for Evel Knieval’s ill-fated attempt at crossing the Snake River canyon in a rocket. You can watch a clip of it here.
It was a long road for Evel from an unsatisfying career as an insurance salesman to that plummeting introduction to the Snake River. As it happens, it was a motorcycle injury–breaking his collarbone and shoulder in a motocross race–that first led Evel to the insurance realm (in multiple ways, one imagines). He found the pay unsatisfying, so he returned to motorcycles, first working as a dealer and then learning some basic tricks. This culminated in his first performance as a daredevil, in Moses Lake, Washington in 1965. The big trick was a jump over a box of rattlesnakes and a mountain lion. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite clear the crate–instead, he shattered it, releasing the snakes. His next big performance, in Barstow, California, turned out even worse. He came up with the idea of hurdling another man on a motorcycle, leaping high and kicking his legs out as the bike passed underneath. You can guess what happened. Evel didn’t get quite high enough. He was hit in the groin, flipped 15 feet in the air, and ended up in the hospital.
He did his best to put on a good show in Graham, Washington in 1967. He had previously pulled off an impressive feat, clearing 15 vehicles on his bike, so he tried to replicate the stunt in Graham. Instead, he clipped the last vehicle and wiped out, suffering a significant concussion. With laudable dedication, he returned to Graham a month later to give the people what they wanted. Instead, he fell short once again, and fell harder, breaking a wrist, a knee, and multiple ribs.
His most famous stunt was probably his attempt to jump over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in December 1967. And yes, once again, it ended poorly, with Evel’s pelvis and femur shattered, his brains scrambled, and another collection of broken bones–both ankles, plus his hip and wrist. Add on the Snake River baptism and it’s easy to wonder if Evel Knievel was just the world’s greatest masochist. For all his successes–and he did, indeed, pull off a number of successful stunts–many of his most prominent attempts concluded in failure, if not outright disaster. The Guinness Book of World Records credits him as the recipient of “the most broken bones in a lifetime,” having endured a whopping 433 total.
Evel’s last attempted jump came in September 1977, when he set out to jump a tank full of sharks. He didn’t even make it to the live show, instead crashing during rehearsal. While he would perform on a smaller-scale in support of his son’s career, that was his last big moment in the spotlight, such as it was.
In 1971, Evel appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. Cavett asked him the only logical question: why on earth do you do this? Evel’s answer was philosophical: “There are three mysteries to life: where we came from, why we do what we do, and where we’re going to go. You don’t know the answer to any of those questions, and I don’t know the answer to any of them. So I never try to answer that. I do it because I’m Evel Knievel and there’s something within me that makes me do it, and I don’t try to figure it out, I just try to do it the best that I can.”
