Boise Airport (Gowen Field)

Idaho's crown jewel: a range of jagged pink-granite spires — over 50 peaks above 10,000 feet, sawing into the sky in a skyline that gave the range its name — cradling more than 400 alpine lakes carved by Ice Age glaciers. Below the peaks sits Redfish Lake, a glacial lake of startling clarity named for the sockeye salmon that once turned it red when they spawned, having swum 900 miles up the Columbia and Snake from the Pacific — one of the longest and highest salmon migrations on Earth. The little town of Stanley, on the Salmon River at the range's foot, is a classic Western mountain hamlet. The Sawtooth National Recreation Area protects it all, alongside the vast Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, the largest in the lower 48.

Ernest Hemingway spent his final years in Ketchum, Idaho. He wrote parts of 'A Moveable Feast' here and is buried in the Ketchum Cemetery beneath a simple stone marker. The Wood River Valley that surrounds Ketchum was Hemingway's ideal landscape — big mountains, clear streams, and open sky. Sun Valley Lodge, where he often wrote, is visible from pattern altitude at Friedman Memorial.

Shoshone Falls drops 212 feet over a basalt rim that is wider than Niagara — about 900 feet at full flow — earning it the local name "Niagara of the West." The Snake River carved the canyon during the Bonneville Flood 14,500 years ago, the same catastrophic drainage that left the Bonneville Salt Flats. The canyon at Twin Falls is 500 feet deep and a quarter-mile across. The Perrine Memorial Bridge, completed in 1976 at 486 feet above the river, replaced a 1927 truss bridge and is one of only a few US bridges where BASE jumping is legal year-round. On September 8, 1974, Evel Knievel attempted to jump the canyon eastward in a steam-powered "Skycycle X-2" rocket; the drogue parachute deployed seconds after launch and Knievel drifted back to crash on the north rim, breaking his nose. The ramp foundation still stands.

On the Idaho-Oregon border, the Snake River has carved the deepest river gorge on the continent — 7,993 feet from the river to the top of Idaho's He Devil Peak, nearly 2,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon. Unlike the Grand Canyon's broad sculpted terraces, Hells Canyon is a tight, V-shaped, wild chasm, much of it accessible only by jet boat or raft through serious whitewater, or on foot. It's remote to the point of emptiness — no roads cross the canyon for over 70 miles — and was the homeland of the Nez Perce, with ancient petroglyphs along the river. The Snake runs green and powerful at the bottom; the canyon walls climb in raw rock and grassland to the snow-capped Seven Devils Mountains on the Idaho rim.