Buckskin Road

A True Adventure in the Hills Above Pocatello, ID

The Sign

We had only been in Idaho a few years when we decided, on a whim and a Saturday morning, to finally explore the hills behind Pocatello.

We had looked at them long enough. From the valley floor you could see the ridgelines pressing in from the east and north, tawny and rolling, cut through by draws and dotted with sage. In winter they held a thin skim of snow along their upper reaches. In summer they went gold and dry. And always, when we looked up at them from the streets of town, there was the vague awareness that roads went up there — dirt roads, gravel tracks, the kind that don’t appear on casual maps — and that we had never followed one.

That Saturday we finally went.

The sign announced itself without fanfare at a turnoff above the city, brown and sun-faded, staked at the edge of the pavement where it bent uphill: BUCKSKIN ROAD. No promise of anything. Just a name and a direction. We looked at each other the way you do when a decision is already made, and we turned.

The Road Up

Buckskin Road started out paved and quickly lost its ambition. Within half a mile the asphalt ended at a clean edge — the kind of cut that suggested a budget running out mid-thought — and gave way to gravel that crackled and popped under the tires. The road narrowed. The sagebrush closed in on both sides. The city fell away behind us, replaced by open country: bunchgrass slopes, rocky outcrops, the occasional hawk hanging on a thermal off the ridge.

We climbed. The Portneuf Gap spread out below us, Pocatello arranged in its valley like something placed there carefully by people who understood they were guests of the surrounding land. From up here the city was quiet, orderly, small in the best way. The hills had a way of putting things in perspective.

The road wound north along the ridge and we drove slowly, in no particular hurry, watching the country open up around us. It was the kind of exploring that doesn’t require a destination — the going itself was the point. We weren’t looking for anything. Which is exactly when you tend to find something.

The Log Home

It sat up off the road on a rise, half hidden by the angle of the slope. A log home, old by the look of it, the kind built when people still felled their own timber and thought a house ought to last a hundred years. The logs had gone grey with weathering, chinked with a lighter mortar that stood out in the late morning light. Small windows. A metal roof gone orange at the seams with rust. And staked in the rocky ground at the base of the rise, a real estate sign.

We slowed to a stop. There was no driveway — just the slope itself, covered in dry grass and loose shale, rising steeply to a small flat where the house sat. No path. No steps cut into the hillside. If you wanted to get up there, you simply climbed.

We sat with the engine idling and looked at it for a while.

“What do you think?”

The kind of question that is also an answer. We got out of the truck.

The Walk Up

The climb was short but honest. The hillside was steep enough to make you watch your footing, the dry grass slippery underfoot, the shale shifting in ways that required some negotiation. There was no obvious line up — you just picked your way, leaning forward, grabbing the occasional clump of sage for balance, until the slope eased and the house was in front of you.

Up close it was even older-looking than it had appeared from the road. The logs were enormous, old-growth timber from a time when that was simply what you built with, and the construction had a solidity to it that modern framing rarely achieves. The porch sagged slightly at one corner. The front door, heavy wood with iron hardware, stood slightly ajar.

We called out of politeness, though we were fairly certain no one was home. The silence came back unbroken except for the wind off the ridge.

We went in.

Warm Inside

The first thing that hit us was the warmth.

It was March, and outside the morning air still had winter in it — the kind of cold that comes in off the high desert before the sun has had time to do its work. We had been dressed for it. But inside the log home it was genuinely warm, the heat radiating from a stone fireplace on the far wall where a fire had clearly been burning recently. The coals were still going, orange and deep, throwing a shifting amber light across the room.

Someone had been here not long ago.

The interior was spare. Rough-hewn shelves. A wooden table scarred with use. A few chairs that had seen better decades. The ceiling was low enough that you felt the weight of the roof above you. It had the feeling of a place built for function rather than comfort — everything in it was there because it needed to be.

Then the second thing hit us.

The smell.

Dog. Strongly, unmistakably dog — the particular concentrated smell of animals living indoors, soaked into the wood and the rugs and the curtains over the narrow windows. We looked at each other. The warmth was still pleasant. The smell was considerably less so.

* * *

The realtor met us back inside a few minutes later, cheerful and professional, undaunted by the remoteness or the smell that had greeted us in the doorway. She had shown stranger properties, you could tell.

We asked about the owner.

“He uses it more as a hunting lodge, really. Keeps his dogs up here. Has for years.”

That explained the fire — lit before he’d left that morning, the coals still holding. That explained the smell. That explained the lack of a proper driveway, the absence of any amenities that weren’t strictly necessary. This wasn’t someone’s home in the way most people mean the word. It was a base camp. A place to sleep between hunts.

We nodded and looked around at the high country spreading out in every direction through the small windows. You could see for miles from up here. You could see game trails on the distant slopes if you knew what to look for. You could be completely invisible from the valley below.

“Family property,”

she added, as if that settled something.

The Basement

We asked to see the rest of it. The realtor led us through the main room and down a set of wooden stairs to the basement.

It was unfinished — poured concrete floor, bare block walls, a single bulb hanging from a wire overhead. Cold down there in a way the upstairs wasn’t, the chill of the earth coming through the walls. A workbench ran the length of one wall, its surface worn smooth by years of the same repeated work.

Then we saw the floor.

Dark stains on the concrete, spread in irregular patterns that had long since dried and settled into the grey. Stains that pooled near a drain in the center of the floor. Stains that, once you understood what you were looking at, could not be easily un-understood.

We stood there quietly for a moment.

The realtor, to her credit, did not look embarrassed.

“He dresses out his deer down here. Elk too, I believe. In the fall, mostly.”

Of course he did. The hunting lodge. The dogs. The fire kept burning during the season so he could come back to warmth after a long day on the ridge. The basement with its drain and its workbench and its concrete floor that cleaned up easily enough — or didn’t, as the evidence suggested.

All of it snapped into focus the way a picture does when you finally understand what you’re looking at.

We looked at the stains. We looked at the drain. We looked at each other.

The Drive Back Down

We thanked the realtor at the bottom of the hill, by the trucks, in the thin March sunshine. She handed us her card with the practiced grace of someone who has learned not to read too much into a client’s expression after a showing. We said we’d be in touch, which is what you say. She said to call anytime, which is what realtors say.

Then we drove back down Buckskin Road the way we had come, the gravel popping under the tires, the city slowly reassembling itself below us in the valley.

We talked about the logs — how solid they were, how they don’t build things like that anymore. We talked about the view from the rise, the way the whole Portneuf Gap spread out from up there. We talked about the fireplace, which was genuinely beautiful, river stone stacked by someone who knew what they were doing.

We did not talk very much about the basement.

By the time we reached the pavement and turned back toward town, the conversation had moved on the way conversations do. The log home on Buckskin Road receded into the particular category of things you almost did but didn’t — not quite a regret, not quite a relief, something in between. A story you’d tell later.

Idaho had a way of handing you those.

* * *

We never went back up Buckskin Road. But sometimes in late fall, when the light goes amber and low over the Portneuf Range and the hills above the city take on that particular gold color that means the season is turning, I think about that log home up on its rise. The fire going in the empty house. The warmth that surprised us in the doorway. The smell that didn’t.

And somewhere up there, I imagine, the old hunter still comes back after a long day on the ridge, climbs his unmarked hillside in the dark, pushes open that heavy door, and stands for a moment in the warmth of his own fire, listening to the dogs settle, looking out through the small windows at the lights of a city that has no idea he’s up there.

That’s Buckskin Road. That’s Idaho.

We only needed to see it once to know it wasn’t ours.

— End —