Owyhee County covers a huge area of remote country in the southwestern corner of the state including high desert, mountainous uplands, and a few ghost towns. South of the northern fringe in the Snake River Valley which has a few settlements, it’s essentially empty. That’s its appeal to drive through. In a book I have on scenic backcountry drives on public lands in the west, there’s an entry for the Owyhee Backcountry Scenic Byway, a 100-mile unpaved road through some of the most remote country in the lower forty-eight. That has my name all over it!

But first I wanted to see world-famous Balanced Rock, located a short distance southwest of Twin Falls. The signage for it is supposedly not great, so I decided to use the navigation system on my phone to get there on the day I drove around the so-called Magic Valley. That turned out to be a big mistake. I lost reception at a point where the map showed the site to still be many miles ahead to the west. I drove on what turned into unpaved roads quite a few miles out into the desert past huge new dairy operations before I finally gave up and continued on to Thousand Springs and Hagerman Fossil Beds. At Hagerman the rangers gave me specific direction on paper to Balanced Rock, which I decided to try to find again on the following day as I left the Twin Falls area to go west. With written directions on a paper map it was much easier that trying to use the GPS on my phone.  It turned out I had driven right past it the previous day but was oblivious to it because of where it appeared to be located on my phone. Technology often sucks! That’s why I still use road atlases.

The rock formation at Balanced Rock is quite spectacular. It doesn’t look to impressive from the parking area along the rose, but if you hike up a few hundred feet and get close to it, you see how precarious-looking the whole thing appears, a huge rock weighing many tons on what seems like a narrow pedestal. It’s the kind of thing that in other places jerks have deliberately knocked down. As fragile as it looks, though, I suspect it’s still way to big and solid for simple people power to do it much damage.

Some distance west toward Boise is the next site in the area, Bruneau Sand Dunes State Park.  The two major dunes cover 600 acres and rise 470 feet above the surrounding plains. They are said to be unique in North America in the sense of being located at the center of a basin rather than at its fringes (as the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado area). I drove the access road through the park and guess I could have hiked up the dunes on the trail, but to be honest, hiking in sand is not a lot of fun. In fact, it’s downright unpleasant and I wasn’t really in the mood for a super hard workout that afternoon.

Among the many guidebooks I have related to travel in the U.S. West is one covering scenic driving on back country byways, primarily on BLM land, wilderness country generally less well known than national forest land. One listed is for the Owyhee Uplands Back Country Byway, a slightly more than 100-mile drive on good graded dirt roads through plateaus, mountains, and canyons in southwestern Idaho.  This is through some really remote country where there are literally no towns and no services for the entire distance.  I headed out on the drive quite late in the afternoon with the plan to car camp somewhere along the way. The first stretch heading west through farmland, then open rangeland, and then rising very gradually through a broad canyon along Poison Creek into the Owyhee Mountains.  The road seemed to go on forever through open rangeland of mixed sagebrush and juniper and pinewoods, up and down through the hills.   I probably could count the cars I passed on the fingers of one hand. Most of what I saw was cattle on the open range.

Shortly after sunset I stopped at a wide flat spot a short distance off the road near Juniper Mountain. I watched the twilight fade into complete darkness in a part of the country with some of the least light pollution in the Lower 48. And then came the deafening roar of fighter jets somewhere far overhead.  They’re based at Mountain Home Air Force Base, which I suppose isn’t very far away in jet terms. Shortly after dark I called it a night, and although it got very cold I felt snug and comfortable under my sleeping bag for what turned out to be the best night of sleep on my trip.

I woke up close to sunrise, scraped the frost off the windshield and continued on. The road turned north and more or less followed the Oregon border through the Owyhee Range, the canyon of the north fork of the Owyhee River, and then through some very remote ranching country to a small hamlet named Jordan Valley just across the border in Oregon. I continued north toward the Snake River Valley and Boise. Overall it was a mostly scenic rather adventurous route through some really remote country but not one with any knock-your-socks-off natural wonders.