

When the wave is running, local kayakers congregate at 36th Street, maneuvering into the watery halfpipe to perform flips and spins as the crowd grows, a time limit of two minutes is enforced. At 36th Street, it creates a four-foot-tall (1-meter) standing wave perpetual motion machine that rolls over onto itself, churning and looping. With all this flow, the river tears through a town, changing from a family-friendly meander into the natural equivalent of a machine-generated rip curl at a water park.
CURL MEANDER CROSSWORD PATCH
Burwell is headed toward what locals call the 36th Street Wave, a once-a-decade phenomenon that occurs when the winter snow has been thick and an early patch of summer weather causes flash melting in the Boise Mountains. He's on his belly, drifting downstream past a half dozen kayakers who sit along the riverbank and watch as he goes by.

Burwell is on his board in the Boise River near the bottom of 36th Street, a few blocks from the bus station, the Idaho State Capitol, and the world's largest french fry factory. Number of Roadless Acres in Idaho- the Most in the Lower 48:īut at the moment, on this Saturday afternoon in May, it is bright and sunny and temperatures have risen into the 80sthe thing that turns Boise into my kind of paradise is a grizzly-bearded surfer named Lakota Burwell. These things alone would beckon pilgrims, like me, in search of urban-outdoor nirvana. It's not that the Boise area includes some of the country's best mountain biking trails, or that deep powder and steeply pitched rock is less than 20 minutes from downtown restaurants and coffeehouses. Nor is it that three rivers converge near here: the Boise, the Payette, and the Snake. It's not because Boise is situated perfectly between Idaho's Rocky Mountains and the vast Great Basin deserts that stretch northward from Nevada.
