In 1974 after reaching the highest pay grade of the Federal Civil Service pay scale, I decided that I had enough of the work I had been doing, and needed to get away from the pressures of the normal work world. I started yearning for wide open spaces. I had a gentleman working for me under contract that was from Idaho, a State which I had never visited. He told me all about his great State, and I started doing some research on my own. He and I took a trip to Idaho on the way to Seattle, Washington on cancer program business. I fell in love with the place.
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| This was the kind of life I was looking for when I started looking in Idaho for a ranch. This photo, taken in the mountains just above the property I finally bought, made my heart leap for joy. I had 17 quarter horses and started out with 250 mother cows and their calves on 500 acres of land which had only been owned once since the days of the homestead of the property. I was the second owner in almost 100 years. |
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| Jim Russell and DIck in front of Jim's mother's house in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1972 |
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| I was looking for a piece of property that had to meet several criteria. One, it had to be farmable land that could sustain some kind of ranching/farming for the first several years after I bought it. Second, it had to be view property. Third, it had to be near a city no matter what the size of that city, and fourth, it had to be dividable so that I could develop it into ranchettes at a later date.
When the time was right, about almost a year later, I moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, bought a small house, met a local Realtor who knew ranchlands, and started looking for property all over this great State.
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My Realtor and I travelled all over Idaho and looked at a lot of ranches. None met my criteria, at least not during the first year. In the meantime, in order to survive financially, I took a job finally with Dr. Bob Beyster and SAIC our of La Jolla, California. Bob told me I could live anywhere I wanted to as long as I was willing to jump on a plane and go whereever he needed help and for as long as it took for me to straighten out whatever mess he had going in that location.
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The place that I found was exactly what I was looking for. It met all the specifications for location and utilization. Weiser, Idaho is a small (4,500 people) town in the Southwest corner of Idaho, right on the Snake River across the river from Oregon. It was only 75 miles northwest of Boise, the capital and the largest city in the state. The property was 500 acres at a price I could afford to pay. The wonderful owners, Jack and Maida Hand had owned the property forever, inheriting it from Jack's father who had homesteaded the property. It was about 70% farmable where crops had been grown over the years, grains and hay. The rest of the property was sage brush, and for the horses, was great.
All of the property was view lots in my mind. From anywhere on the property you could see mountains all around you. To the West, you could see forever. And to the South was the Weiser River Valley, the north-south highway, Route US 95 which went from the bottom of Idaho to the top, a long beautiful drive with only small towns the whole distance.
The property was only about an hour and a half south of McCall which had one of the best ski areas in the West, unknown almost to the rest of the world. Idahoans knew about it, but at the time there were less than 800,000 of them in the whole State.
In the Photo Albums below, click on the individual photos for a larger print of the thumbnail along with an explanation of the photo itself. Thanks.
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All those years of sitting in offices all over the country, I often thought about the "open spaces" that now I was experiencing here in Idaho. What a beautiful land. What a great land without all the people that were crowding the rest of the country. We got to see this great state and its beauty right from our ranch in Weiser.
Again, click on the thumbnail to get a larger view as well as an explantion of the photo.
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My years in Idaho came to an end with the realization that I couldn't live the rest of my life in that manner. My personality was such that I had to be more involved in technology development, and although life on the ranch was a real break from the routine I had followed all my working days so far, it wasn't the way I really wanted to live forever more.
Besides, I was running out of money to do the things I wanted to do!
With a job away from Idaho and still owning the ranch, I could go on developing land and enjoying being there when I could. So that's what I did.
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