Idaho Trivia & Tidbits - Page 11

Looking for Idaho trivia? Try our list Idaho little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Author Vardis Fisher, whose novel Mountain Man became the 1972 movie Jeremiah Johnson (starring Robert Redford), was born in Annis in 1895, and graduated from high school in Rigby (pop. 2,998) in 1915. Fisher also is known for Children of God, his story of the Mormons, which won the 1939 Harper Prize for Fiction.

first appeared: 10/12/2003

Starting in 1843, the “City of Rocks” near Almo (pop. 40) became a landmark for pioneers traveling the California Trail and the Salt Lake Alternate Trail. One traveler, James Wilkins, wrote that the strange granite formations rising out of the ground looked like “a dismantled, rock-built city of the Stone Age.” Today, the area is a national reserve, where visitors can still see the signatures of pioneers who wrote their names in axle grease on the rocks.

first appeared: 10/5/2003

U.S. Olympic gold medalist Dan O’Brien, from Moscow (pop. 21,291), placed first at the 1996 Olympics in the decathlon (a two-day, 10-event athletics competition in which athletes earn points for each event). He also earned a decathlon world record in 1992, with a score of 8,891 points.

first appeared: 9/28/2003

Dated to 14,500 years ago, the arrowheads and bison and antelope bones excavated in 1959 at Wilson Butte Cave, near Twin Falls (pop. 34,469), are the earliest known evidence of humans living on the Snake River Plain. At that time, a cooler climate would have supported an area of shallow lakes, marshes, forests, and sagebrush.

first appeared: 9/21/2003

Island Park (pop. 215) is located inside one of the world’s largest calderas, or collapsed lava domes. The caldera is more than a million years old and measures 18 miles wide by 33 miles long (the same length as Island Park’s main street). At 10,000 feet, nearby Sawtelle Peak was once part of the caldera’s rim.

first appeared: 9/14/2003

Grangeville (pop. 3,228) hosts the state’s oldest rodeo—Border Days, first held in 1912 and still a main attraction of Fourth of July festivities. Surrounded by five wilderness areas and four national forests, the town offers access to some 5.5 million acres of wilderness, and its airport is home to the Nez Perce National Forest’s smokejumpers base.

first appeared: 9/7/2003

More than 6,000 acres of land around Grace (pop. 990) in the Gem Valley are planted with certified seed potatoes, with the seed being sold throughout Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and even Hawaii. Potatoes were first grown in Grace in 1922, and, since 1956, all potato growers in the area must plant certified seed.

first appeared: 8/31/2003

Idaho is the nation’s top potato-growing state, with an annual production of 13.8 billion pounds, valued at $2.5 billion.

first appeared: 8/31/2003

Grupo Modelo, Mexico’s leading brewer and the producer of Corona Extra beer, selected Idaho Falls (pop. 50,730) last year as the site of a new $64 million malting plant—its first such plant outside Mexico. The plant will process up to 58,000 acres of barley annually once it begins production in late 2004 or early 2005.

first appeared: 8/24/2003

In the Bitterroot National Forest, some scarred, centuries-old ponderosa pines are known as “Indian Trees.” The scars show where the Salish, Kootenai, Nez Perce, and Shoshone tribes stripped the tree’s outer bark to access the chewy, sweet cambium layer (a delicacy). The trees survived because the cuts didn’t circle the entire tree.

first appeared: 8/17/2003

American Indians from throughout the Northwest once gathered in what became known as the Council Valley, to trade and to celebrate the start of the Weiser River salmon run. The festival peaked about 1872, with some 2,500 people in attendance. The local town of Council (pop. 816) was known as Council Valley when it was established in 1878, but its name was shortened in 1896.

first appeared: 8/10/2003

From 1903 to 1939, a tram ran from Camas Prairie grain fields to a flour mill in Kooskia (pop. 675), a mile and a quarter away. The tramway was operated by two cables that stretched its entire length, and carried 30 buckets for the grain.

first appeared: 8/3/2003

Created in 1908, Heyburn State Park near Plummer (pop. 990) is the oldest state park in the Pacific Northwest. President William Howard Taft signed the deed that gave the state 5,505 acres of land and 2,333 acres of water. The park was named for U.S. Sen. W.B. Heyburn of Idaho.

first appeared: 7/27/2003

The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial opened in Boise in 2002 as the nation’s first permanent memorial to the young Jewish girl whose diary described life in hiding from the Germans during World War II. Contributions from Idaho schoolchildren and former Prodigy executive Greg Carr (from Idaho Falls) helped build the memorial’s educational park, which promotes human dignity and diversity.

first appeared: 7/20/2003

Ernest Hemingway, who earned both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize for his fiction, is buried in Ketchum (pop. 3,003), where he died in 1961. Hemingway bought a house in Ketchum in 1959, having first visited the area 20 years earlier when he wrote part of For Whom the Bell Tolls there.

first appeared: 7/13/2003

On Dec. 20, 1951, the world’s first nuclear-generated, useable electricity was produced at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Arco (pop. 1,026). In 1955, Arco became the world’s first city to be powered by nuclear-generated electricity. In the past 51 years, 52 nuclear reactors have been designed, built, and operated at the lab.

first appeared: 7/6/2003

Myrtle Enking (1879-1972) was the first woman state treasurer in Idaho, and the second in the nation. After attending business college, she served as Gooding County auditor for 14 years. She ran for state treasurer in 1932, and held that position from 1933 to 1944.

first appeared: 6/29/2003

The gondola lift at Silver Mountain ski resort in Kellogg (pop. 2,395) is considered the world’s longest single-stage people-carrying gondola. It can carry 1,600 people per hour at a speed of 1,000 feet per minute, and is 3.1 miles long.

first appeared: 6/22/2003

Established in 1937, the Idaho Potato Commission promotes and markets the state’s largest crop with a 10-cent tax on every 100 pounds of potatoes grown using registered certification marks and trademarks such as “Grown in Idaho” and “Famous Idaho Potatoes.” Idaho farmers produced more than 13 billion pounds of potatoes in 2002, about a third of the nation’s fall crop.

first appeared: 6/22/2003

Meridian (pop. 34,919) is named for the Boise Meridian, a surveying line that runs through the town, and forms an exact north-south line through the state from the border with Nevada to the border with British Columbia. The meridian was used by the Idaho land surveyor, and was based on an independent initial point—a volcanic hill 16 miles south of Meridian.

first appeared: 6/15/2003

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