It's not because Boise is situated perfectly between Idaho's Rocky Mountains and the vast Great Basin deserts that stretch northward from Nevada. Nor is it that three rivers converge near here: the Boise, the Payette, and the Snake. It's not that the Boise area includes some of the country's best mountain biking trails, or that deep powder and steeply pitched rock are less than 20 minutes from downtown restaurants and coffeehouses. These things alone would beckon pilgrims, like me, in search of urban-outdoor nirvana.

Adventure Guide: Boise, Idaho  |  30 More Towns Perfect For You

BOISE BY THE NUMBERS: Population: 211,473     Elevation: 2,842 feet (866 meters)     Average Temperature: Summer:71°F (22°C) Winter: 32°F (0°C)      Median Home Price: $210,450   Median Household Income: $38,112   Number of Roadless Acres in Idaho—the Most in the Lower 48: 17 million   Relocation Information: www.boisechamber.org

But at the moment, on this Saturday afternoon in May—it is bright and sunny and temperatures have risen into the 80s—the thing that turns Boise into my kind of paradise is a grizzly-bearded surfer named Lakota Burwell. • Burwell is on his board in the Boise River near the bottom of 36th Street, a few blocks from the bus station, the Idaho State Capitol, and the world's largest french fry factory. He's on his belly, drifting downstream past a half dozen kayakers who sit along the riverbank and watch as he goes by. Burwell is headed toward what locals call the 36th Street Wave, a once-a-decade phenomenon that occurs when the winter snow has been thick and an early patch of summer weather causes flash melting in the Boise Mountains. With all this flow, the river tears through town, changing from a family-friendly meander into the natural equivalent of a machine-generated rip curl at a water park. At 36th Street, it creates a four-foot-tall (1-meter) standing wave—a perpetual motion machine that rolls over onto itself, churning and looping.

When the wave is running, local kayakers congregate at 36th Street, maneuvering into the watery halfpipe to perform flips and spins; as the crowd grows, a time limit of two minutes is
enforced. But few kayakers succeed at staying
on the wave for their allotted time. I've been watching from the south bank as paddler after paddler has moved into the foam and caught the wave, only to be shot out into calm water with as little as a second or two of coveted hang time. For the past ten minutes, though, the line has been halted. Everyone is waiting for Burwell.



On his first attempt, he drifts back into the wave but misses the high spot and is ejected instantly. On his second try, he manages to hold himself in place for half a minute, but the moment he tries to stand, he's bucked off.

One more try. This time, Burwell holds himself in the current, his board lifting in place as the wave rolls onto itself. Two minutes pass, and then he vaults and stands. The board sets into the wave and stays there. It isn't one of those huge, picturesque overheads, but the current is moving as hard and fast as any shoreline break. It takes pure strength for Burwell to stay upright. Ten . . . 20 . . . 30 seconds: He's out.

Just half a minute. But it is enough. The paddlers, along with a dozen bike riders and joggers who've stopped to watch, burst into applause. Here, in the most remote urban area in the United States, with the nearest ocean more than 500 miles (805 kilometers) away, a surfer caught and rode a wave.

I want to talk with Burwell, but he's on the other side of the river. So I jump into a truck belonging to my buddy Roger Phillips, an outdoor writer for the local Idaho Statesman newspaper, and we head a few blocks west to the Veterans Memorial Centennial Bridge. For the past several days, I've been testing out Boise with Roger and other friends, meeting paddlers and mountain bikers, rock climbers and trail runners, and discovering what might just be the largest concentration of within-city-limits outdoor activity in the U.S.

Telling people that you're thinking about moving to Boise can be a surprising conversation starter. Everyone assumes that there's plenty to do outdoorswise, but the perceived redneck factor is unavoidable. Suggest the town to someone who's been dreaming of Asheville, Boulder, or Bend, and the notion of living in a place where, presumably, there will be no one to help with the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle produces this response: Boise? Idaho? Are you kidding?

That was my own reaction when my friend Dave Yasuda first mentioned the city to me eight years ago. For years I'd contemplated joining America's urban-to-rural diaspora—the demographic shift that, for the past few decades, has been repopulating the West's smaller towns with equity-rich city dwellers in search of their own private utopias. I was a classic case. Dissatisfied with having to commute to both work and play in Los Angeles, I fantasized about giving up the crowded city for a place with lower home prices, less traffic, and rapid access to the sports I love.

On one Saturday afternoon ride in the Santa Monica Mountains, Dave told me he was planning to move to Boise with his wife and young daughter. It turned out that Idaho was his home state; his Japanese grandparents had settled there as potato farmers after being interned in Oregon during World War II. Growing up, Dave had yearned for the cultural diversity of California and a faster career track in marketing, so he headed south. But now, with a toddler, he wanted a less frantic lifestyle. "If we stayed [in L.A.]," he says, "I might not have been able to have everything. I would have had to give up my job, or my family life, or my biking." It was far easier to give up Los Angeles.

"Boise really is a cool place," he said. "You'll see, if you come visit."

A few months later I showed up at his door—and within hours I was convinced. Boise had good ethnic restaurants and smart, engaging people. Dave and I hung out at a dark bar that had once been frequented by Basque sheepherders who worked in the mountains north of town; one sip of thick red wine and a bowl of bean soup later, I was sure I'd landed in the Pyrenees. There were nice, affordable homes within five minutes of downtown. Dave and his wife, Jodee, had just bought one that adjoins city parkland, giving them my own particular version of the holy grail: no-commute trail access. (The house itself is the kind of mid-century streamliner that goes for $800,000 in my Los Angeles neighborhood, but costs less than $300,000 in Boise.) Another couple I met, "equity refugees" who made a profit selling their house in New York City's suburbs and buying one in Boise, had purchased a second home in the mountains two hours north of town, complete with an on-premises hot spring.

Boosting Boise's spot on my relocation list was the weather—it's cold in winter, but the place is dry and nearly always sunny, with just 12 inches (30 centimeters)  of rain and 234 cloudless days a year—and the city's connectedness to western and midwestern metropolises (daily nonstops fly to Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle). Back in California, the more I talked with other would-be emigrants, the more I realized that the entire state of Idaho is becoming something of a relocation mecca. As mountain towns in Colorado and Montana see real estate prices go through the roof and sprawl creep in, potential urban refugees are looking to the Gem State. The result: In the first quarter of 2006, housing prices in Idaho appreciated faster than anywhere else in the Rocky Mountains. Places such as McCall and Sandpoint are attracting folks looking for a big little town rather than a small big city, such as Boise. The perception is that life is still easy, cheap, and fun in Idaho. You get the feeling that you're in the real West, not some mini-mall encrusted artifact of it.

I visited a few more times, mountain biking, paddling the Payette and Salmon Rivers, snowboarding the Bogus Basin Ski Resort, and taking a lazy flatboat float on the Snake River, where I saw peregrine falcons diving for chimney swifts, striking them at high speed, and then catching them in midair before they hit the water. I learned that Boise's name comes from French trappers who dubbed it Le Bois, or "the woods," and that the town had once been a waypoint for an earlier wave of migrants—pioneers on the Oregon Trail. On my last visit I noticed that Boise's arts scene had progressed considerably: There were new music venues and museums, all centered around the Grove, a downtown pedestrian area that mixes restaurants, nightclubs, and cultural attractions.

For Dave, 47, even the career issue has been settled. He has found employment as a marketer in the local high-tech boom, working for companies ranging from small Internet start-ups to Hewlett-Packard and Micron. Based on his experience, Boise jumped to the top of my relocation list. And this was before I'd even heard of the wave.

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Adventure Guide: Boise, Idaho  |  30 More Towns Perfect For You

 




Adventure's September 2006 issue features 31 amazing adventure towns; chaos at the top of Mount Everest; an inside look at surfing California's Lost Coast; 11 fall weekend getaways near you; the best high-tech footwear, world class adventure travel; hiking the Alps, and more!




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