Author, historian and river guide Cort Conley to speak in Weiser on Historic River Trips

 Author, speaker, historian and western river guide Cort Conley has assembled a two-hour presentation of vintage films and photographs that showcase early adventures on Idaho’s Snake and Salmon rivers.
 Conley will present a program on historic river trips on Monday, Oct. 21, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Weiser High School auditorium. The event is free to the public.
 “River stories interest me because I was a river guide in three states for 33 years and have always been fascinated by western history,” Conley said in an email.
 Conley will show amazing photos and offer an informed narrative on Amos Burg’s 1926 canoe trip down the Snake River from Jackson Lake in Wyoming to the Columbia River.
 Burg, who was born in Portland, Ore., to Norweigan immigrants, took on the Snake River after he  made the first complete canoe voyage on the Columbia River from its headwaters in British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. The trip began Oct. 20, 1924 and finished on Jan. 7, 1925.
 As a result of the newspaper coverage of the trip, Burg went on the lecture circuit to detail his adventures to a public infatuated with stories of courage.
 Burg followed up his Columbia River trip with a canoe voyage down the length of the Snake River.
 Conley said he corresponded with Burg in Alaska for some time before they met. He used to go to the hospital in Seattle where Burg was being treated for cancer and tape their conversations while he was lying in bed.
 He got the historic photos from Burg before he died. At the time of this 1925 canoe trip down the Snake, there were five dams to get around.
 Conley also has exciting footage from 1943 and the backstory of a scow trip down the main Salmon River. Shooting the rapids on the River of No Return in a scow was no leisurely trip.
 He will wrap up the program with a 30-minute film about the Clegg Expedition up the Columbia and Snake rivers in 1939. As Conley will point out in his Weiser visit, it hasn’t been only men who have sought out river adventures.
 Edith Clegg was a wealthy socialite and widow who was fascinated by the Lewis and Clark expedition. At age 58 Clegg decided to undertake her own voyage of discovery by crossing the country from west to east by water route.
 Conley has collected information on Clegg’s grand adventure from 1939. He told the television program “Outdoor Idaho” a few years ago that he was intrigued by Clegg and her grandioise plans.
 “One thing that interests me is how people get the idea for their so-called adventure. How does somebody sit down and look at a map of Idaho and decide they want to cross it by water, and then decide they want to go clear across the country by water, and they set about finding out how they could maybe do that?”
 Conley has lived his own adventures as a western river guide for 30-plus years. A resident of Boise, he is the director of literary services at the Idaho Commission on the Arts. He has an extensive background as a writer, editor, and publisher of books.
 Among his many books, Conley wrote “Idaho for the Curious: A Guide” in 1982 and it remains a popular guide to interesting places in Idaho. He holds a law degree from the University of California.
 Conley’s program is sponsored by the Weiser Architectural Preservation Committee and the Idaho Humanities Council.