Billy Rice Swim Beach

A small sandy beach on the west side of Warm Lake, ringed by tall trees, is where the Cascade Ranger District of the Boise National Forest sends people for a swim and a picnic on a hot summer day. The way in is the Warm Lake Highway, east from a turnoff a mile north of Cascade. After 25 miles, just past South Fork Salmon River Campground, Forest Service Road 427 bears right, and the beach is about a mile and a half on. The lot holds fewer than a dozen cars. Others walk over from the parking lot at Shoreline Boating. The site has picnic tables and a vault toilet but no drinking water, and it is open from May 23 to September 13, or until snow closes it.

The west shore of Warm Lake

Picnic Point and Shoreline campgrounds lie close by. Shoreline sits across the road from the lake at 5,300 feet in a mixed lodgepole pine forest with partial shade, with a boat ramp across the road. Recreation.gov lists the lake’s fish as cutthroat, rainbow, lake, and bull trout, and its wildlife as bears, deer, elk, fox, grouse, eagles, osprey, grosbeaks, whooping cranes, and otters. It warns that bears frequent the area. A lake description reprinted by The Yellow Pine Times adds brook trout, mountain whitefish, and kokanee salmon. The same account gives Warm Lake as 640 acres at 5,298 feet, the largest natural lake in the Boise National Forest.

The 1888 and 1895 maps mark it “Hot Lake,” and some mining claims took their bearings from that name, though earlier maps showed it as Warm Lake. A Forest Service handbook for the old Payette National Forest says the lake takes its name from the mineralized springs nearby. On July 24, 1879, during the Sheepeater Campaign, Captain R. F. Bernard and 60 cavalry camped at its northeast end. The lake lay in Idaho County until 1917, when the Idaho legislature formed Valley County from parts of Boise and Idaho counties. That same year a road was built east from Warm Lake to Landmark.

Cabins came to the west shore in 1933. LeRoy Meyer’s Warm Lake history, drawing on a Gill/Foster oral history, records that Sylvester Kinney’s people and Gordon Blinn and his son Herbert built at the same time. They worked one day on one cabin and the next day on the other while Ruth Kinney Gill cooked for them in a tent. The Kinney cabin measured 16 by 20 feet. Two years later a dam at the outlet raised the lake’s natural level about 15 inches.

The CCC camp and the plunge

In 1933 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, designated F-166, opened at Warm Lake on ground now occupied by the Baptist camp, and it ran until the Second World War. Its newspaper, “Chipmunk Chatter,” was published September 5, 1933. Winters were hard enough that the enrollees were sent by train to Reno for the winter of 1936–37. The corps built the Warm Lake water system. On the South Fork of the Salmon River it built a swimming pool filled with hot-spring water, which opened in 1936.

The Payette Forest handbook describes the lake in those years as the center of the largest recreation development on the forest. Summer homes stood on sites leased from the Forest Service at a nominal fee, and Boy and Girl Scouts held leased sites near the shore. Of the pool, the handbook says it “comes as a surprise when first seen in its sylvan setting of virgin pines and attractive rock outcroppings,” with dressing rooms for swimmers.

The lake also took lives. On July 29, 1939, a CCC worker named Ambrose Mitchell drowned when the boat he was rowing capsized. His body was recovered the next day. On August 31, 1945, a two-year-old boy fell from a boat and his father jumped in after him. The boat drifted away, and neither could swim. A six-and-a-half-year-old brother was left adrift, and several boats dragged for the two bodies, which were never found.

Camp Billy Rice

William B. “Billy” Rice died of typhoid fever in Boise on July 26, 1933, at the age of 16, according to the Cascade News of July 28, 1933, as cited in Meyer’s history. Boy Scout Camp Billy Rice opened at the northwest part of Warm Lake in 1934 and ran through 1972. On July 19, 1935, the Cascade News announced the camp open with about 70 scouts already there. Meyer gives the number as 65 to 70, from Emmett and Nyssa, and notes that scout officials were trying to get the CCC to help build an assembly hall, an outdoor fireplace, and other permanent structures. By July 1936 the paper reported the Ore-Ida Boy Scout camp open through July and August, with camping periods of 10 days instead of 7 and “a new swimming pool” as an added attraction. Meyer’s note on that item reads: “this must be the Warm Lake plunge.” A photograph caption in the Payette handbook reads: “Billy Rice Boy Scout Camp at Warm Lake. Hundreds of Idaho and Oregon boys vacation here.”

Billy’s father, William Ben Rice, was a Forest Service man. He held a master’s degree in forestry from Yale in 1912 and was ranger on the South Fork of the Salmon in 1917. He then served as supervisor of the old Payette National Forest, from 1925 to 1937 by the Forest Service’s account and to 1938 by Meyer’s, and became regional forester from 1944 to 1950. A Ross Hadfield oral history says he was “very instrumental” in helping the Scouts establish the Warm Lake camp. Meyer, citing Stan Pilcher, Hadfield, and a book by Cox, writes that the Rice family paid the camp’s lease fee every year it operated, in honor of their son.

The Forest Service’s own biography of Ben Rice tells the story differently. It says the camp was named for the Rices’ only child, “who died as an infant.” It also records that Rice died of a heart attack at 61 aboard a train between McCall and Boise, returning from a fire review conference. Meyer gives the date as January 13, 1950, and says Rice Peak, formerly Blue Point Peak, was named for him.

The country around the camp changed hands on paper more than once. The old Payette National Forest, which held Warm Lake, was combined with the Boise in 1944. In 1972, the camp’s last year, the forest’s ranger districts were consolidated to six, and the Warm Lake country went to the Cascade Ranger District, which keeps the beach today. At the end of 1973 the hot-spring pool on the South Fork was closed and filled with soil.