One Valley at a Time: Long Valley - More Than Just Driving to McCall

If you’ve ever driven Highway 55 toward McCall, there’s a good chance you’ve been through Long Valley without really thinking about it.

You pass Cascade and Lake Cascade stretches out beside you. Then Donnelly comes and goes. Mountains surround the whole drive, and eventually McCall and Payette Lake start getting most of the attention.

But the valley underneath all of that has its own story.

Long Valley stretches more than 30 miles through the North Fork Payette River drainage, from the Payette Lake area south toward Cascade and Round Valley. It’s such a defining part of this corner of Idaho that when Valley County was created in 1917, the county was actually named for Long Valley.

And once you start looking a little closer, you will find railroads that changed, which towns survived, a reservoir that covered farms and moved families away, an almost-ghost town that refused to disappear, and a landscape that has been used by people for thousands of years.

So this week, we’re heading north for another One Valley at a Time.

Welcome to Long Valley.

First Things First: Long Valley Is Bigger Than McCall

McCall tends to get top billing up here and honestly, we understand why, it's beautiful.

There’s Payette Lake, mountain views, restaurants, shops, skiing, trails, and plenty of reasons to make a weekend out of it.

But Long Valley is much more than McCall.

Cascade anchors the southern end and Donnelly sits farther north. Historic Roseberry is tucked just east of Donnelly and ranch land, forests, Lake Cascade, the North Fork Payette River, and smaller communities fill in everything between.

Long before vacation homes and weekend traffic on Highway 55, this landscape was used by Indigenous people for hunting, fishing, gathering, and seasonal living.

Evidence of Native American presence around what is now Lake Cascade goes back more than 10,000 years, and the area remains culturally important to the Nez Perce Tribe and Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.

So while Long Valley may feel like a mountain getaway today, people have been connected to this landscape for a very long time.

Then the Railroad Showed Up and Rearranged Everything

If you’ve ever wondered how one set of railroad tracks can completely change a town, Long Valley has a pretty good example of how that happens.

In the early 1900s, Roseberry was growing.

By 1905, it had a hotel, stores, blacksmith shops, a restaurant, a butcher shop, a logging mill, and a creamery.

Then the railroad came through Long Valley.

There was just one problem, it didn’t go through Roseberry. The tracks passed about two miles west of town instead and apparently, when the railroad doesn’t come to you, sometimes you go to the railroad.

Homes and businesses began moving toward the tracks, helping create the town we now know as Donnelly. Roseberry slowly lost much of its activity and became what is often described as a semi-ghost town.

That could have been the end of the story. Instead, people decided the old town was worth saving.

Roseberry Refused to Completely Disappear

Today, Historic Roseberry is one of those places where you can walk around and get a much better sense of what Long Valley looked like before the highway became the main way most of us move through it.

The Long Valley Preservation Society was formed in 1973 to preserve the history of Roseberry and the surrounding valley.

The townsite now includes the Valley County Museum, the old Roseberry General Store, and historic homes. There is also a church, schoolhouse, barns, and other buildings connected to the area’s past.

Some are original to Roseberry, others were moved there from around Long Valley so they wouldn’t disappear.

There’s even a Finnish homestead area that reflects the families who settled in this part of Idaho. They brought their building traditions with them including, a sauna because some things are worth hauling across an ocean and rebuilding in Idaho.

If you normally drive straight through Donnelly on your way north, Roseberry is only about a mile east of town.

It’s an easy detour and a good reminder that sometimes the interesting part of an Idaho road trip is the turn you almost didn’t take.

Lake Cascade Changed the Valley in a Much Bigger Way

Then came another change, one that couldn’t be moved a couple of miles down the road.

In 1948, Cascade Dam was completed on the North Fork Payette River.

The reservoir created behind it was built for irrigation water storage and flood control, but filling it changed Long Valley permanently.

Some of the valley’s farming and ranching land disappeared under the water, highway 55 had to be rerouted, and families living in the affected area had to relocate. The reservoir was later renamed Lake Cascade. Today, it’s hard to imagine the valley without it.

The lake has become one of the area’s defining landmarks and a major place for fishing, including ice fishing, boating, camping, and other outdoor recreation. But every time you look across that water, you’re also looking at a landscape that used to look very different.

That’s one of those Idaho history details that makes you want a before-and-after photo immediately.

And Then There’s the Hot Water

Of course, Long Valley also the best way to recover after hiking, skiing, snowmobiling, or spending several hours sitting in weekend traffic:

It's getting in some very hot water.

The greater Valley County area has several established hot springs, including Gold Fork Hot Springs near Donnelly.

And honestly, sitting in naturally heated mineral water while surrounded by Idaho mountains is the best way to end the day.

Hot springs are part of what makes this area work as more than a summer destination.

Long Valley Keeps Reinventing Itself

That may be the most interesting part of Long Valley, it keeps changing.

Mining brought people through, ranching and farming put down roots, the railroad shifted towns, logging became one of the valley’s major industries, a dam changed the landscape, and over time, recreation and tourism became a much bigger part of the local economy.

You can still see pieces of nearly every version of Long Valley if you know where to look;

• Historic buildings in Roseberry.

• Old railroad history around Donnelly and McCall.

• The places where mills once operated.

• Ranches sitting beneath the mountains.

• Lake Cascade covering ground that once looked completely different.

And communities that have figured out how to keep changing without completely letting go of what came before.

If You Go, Don’t Just Drive Through

That’s our biggest takeaway from Long Valley.

It’s very easy to treat this part of Idaho as the road between Boise and McCall, but slow down a little. Stop in Cascade and walk, take the turn toward Historic Roseberry, look out across Lake Cascade and remember that farms and homes once sat where there’s water today. Spend some time in Donnelly instead of only passing through.

And yes, keep going to McCall too.

The point isn’t to skip the places everybody knows. It’s to notice everything in between.

Because sometimes an Idaho valley you’ve driven through a dozen times turns out to have been telling you a long story the whole way through.

Have you spent time in Long Valley?

Tell us the place you always stop or the little spot most people drive right past in the comments below.

And if there’s another Idaho valley you think we should explore next, we want to hear that too.