The Places I’ve Been and The Things I’ve Seen

by: Tom Sorenson

Living a dominantly outdoor lifestyle has afforded me with many treasures – one of which is a memory bank of scenery. Some of these wonderful sights I’ve captured on camera, others are locked away securely in my mind’s eye – and are just as real today as they were when I first saw them.

This photo is an old one of one of my family’s favorite haunts – Hell’s Canyon. It is rough, steep (it’s a canyon, of course it’s steep), deep (the deepest canyon in North America), and a killer to hike through, but is it beautiful or what?! Here’s another photo – taken with a digital camera:

I can’t imagine being confined to a world of concrete and blacktop where I would have missed this sight from Idaho:

Here is a picture from the majestic Steens Mountains – at one time a great place to hunt nice mule deer, now, due to cougars problems, it is just a beatiful place to visit:

Sometimes we take for granted the things that we see because we spend so much time in the outdoors. But, think of those that have never had the opportunity to experience a sunrise over the Rocky Mountains, or the moonlight dancing off a clear mountain lake, or the people who’ve never known what it is to see a herd of elk graze on land unhindered by roads – or even trails. I pity those people – I truly feel sorry for them, because I’ve known these sights from when I was a little kid and my parent’s took us kids hiking up the Imnaha River in Oregon, or into Strawberry Lakes in Oregon, and more recent memories of hunting in Hell’s Canyon, Fall Creek of Idaho, and Lookout Mountain in Oregon. I’ve hiked in the Cascade mountain range as well as the Rockies. I’ve hiked in the Sierra Nevada mountains and I’ve fished the valleys and canyons of the Salmon River in Idaho, Sun Lakes in Washington, the Truckee River in California, small lakes in Minnesota, Lake Tahoe in Nevada/California. I’ve floated the Colorado River In Arizona, I’ve explored Glenn Canyon in Arizona, and I’ve had the good fortune of growing up near the Owyhee country in Oregon and Idaho. There are memories and sights I’ve seen from places it would take a lifetime to tell – and never could I tell it so well as if a person could just experience it for themselves.

Here is a couple parting shots from a backpack trip into the Seven Devils of Idaho: