HELLS CANYON, Ore. — Through rain, snow, sleet or gloom of night, the mail must get through, as the saying goes.
But through the rapids of the Snake River? That’s another story.
And yet, 54-year-old postmaster Gary Henderson does just that, piloting a jet boat down the treacherous waters of the Snake, covering 130 miles and nine customers in a typical two-day run.
Henderson and his two deckhands work for Beamers Hells Canyon Tours in Clarkston, Wash., which holds a contract with the U.S. Postal Service. The once-a-week run is among the last of its kind in the nation, serving ranchers, cowhands, caretakers, miners and assorted recluses from Heller Bar south of Asotin, Wash., to Johnson Bar beneath Oregon’s Hat Point lookout.
They are especially welcome this time of year, when he comes bearing holiday packages and cards for the hardy residents who live on the Snake River’s banks.
“In the wintertime,” Henderson said, “we are the lifeline to the outside. I take pride in my job.”
Mail customers often ride for miles to meet Henderson at an appointed time, on their ATVs, like Gary Bullock, 48, who lives in a snow-covered ranch headquarters at 4,200 feet elevation, where he cares for 500 cows with his wife, Joni, 48, and their two teenage sons.
While the mail boat keeps Bullock and his family abreast of happenings in the communities around them, it also brings fresh milk and eggs and books from the library in Clarkston.
“It’s a unique breed that lives up here,” said Henderson.
He doesn’t always have an easy ride, either — a rock lurking below the surface can easily punch a hole in the hull, and Henderson must read the changing river constantly to prevent that.
The boat passes long-abandoned mine shafts and the ruins of mining stamp mills and the foundations of frontier-era hotels and even long-vanished towns.
Iron rings remain in some rocks, used long ago by sternwheeler paddle boats to winch through rapids. Remains of the 125-foot steamboat Imnaha, which sank Nov. 9, 1903, still rest at the bottom of a whirlpool in Mountain Sheep Rapids, said Henderson.
The Hells Canyon mail boat is a tradition extending to the first mail contract awarded to Ed MacFarlane in 1926, who used a propeller-driven, 65-foot river boat called Prospector.
Dick Rivers, father of Henderson’s deckhand Joe Rivers, had the mail contract from 1958 until 1982 and became a legend for building one of the first large jet boats on the Snake and waging a series of legal battles to stabilize minimum river flows.
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