IDIdaho Fun Facts

Idaho is the only state with a made up name. A lobbyist named George M. Willing pitched the word to Congress in 1860, claiming it was a Shoshone phrase meaning gem of the mountains. It was not. Idaho means nothing in any Native language, the fraud was exposed before the name was assigned, and the state kept it anyway.

Facts most people get wrong

• Potatoes are not Idaho's biggest earner. The state grows roughly a third of the national potato crop, but milk regularly outranks potatoes in farm cash receipts, and Idaho sits among the top handful of dairy states.
• Idaho is not all on Mountain time. The ten counties of the northern panhandle run on Pacific time, so driving north on US 95 gains you an hour without leaving the state.
• Boise is not pronounced boy-zee. Residents say BOY-see, and the z is the fastest way to identify a visitor.
• The Grand Canyon is not the deepest gorge in the country. Hells Canyon, on the Idaho and Oregon line, drops about 7,993 feet below He Devil Peak, the deepest river gorge in North America.
• Idaho's Canadian border is tiny. It runs roughly 45 miles along British Columbia, the shortest stretch of Canadian border held by any state that touches Canada.
• Sun Valley was not a mountain village that grew into a resort. Union Pacific built it from scratch in 1936 to sell rail tickets, and the world's first chairlift there was adapted from machinery used to load bananas onto ships.

Records and firsts

• The world's first chairlift began carrying skiers at Sun Valley in 1936.
• Arco became the first town anywhere lit by nuclear power on July 17, 1955, using the BORAX-III reactor at what is now Idaho National Laboratory.
• Shoshone Falls on the Snake River drops 212 feet, about 45 feet farther than Niagara.
• The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness covers roughly 2.3 million acres, the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 states.
• Apollo astronauts trained on the lava flows at Craters of the Moon in 1969 because the ground there resembled the lunar surface they were about to walk on.
• Idaho became the 43rd state on July 3, 1890.

Geography that surprises

• Idaho touches six states plus British Columbia: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.
• The state runs roughly 480 miles north to south and narrows from about 305 miles wide in the south to 45 miles at the Canadian line. That panhandle shape puts Coeur d'Alene closer to Seattle than to its own capital.
• The Salmon River, the River of No Return, flows about 425 miles without a dam, the longest undammed river held entirely inside one state in the lower 48.
• The state capitol in Boise is heated with geothermal water pumped from an aquifer beneath the foothills, the only state capitol in the country heated that way.

Where the name comes from

George M. Willing proposed the word Idaho in 1860 for the mining region that became Colorado. Congress nearly used it until word spread that the Shoshone translation was invented, and the territory was named Colorado instead in 1861.

The invented word drifted north with the miners. When Congress carved out a new territory in 1863 it used Idaho, and by then the fake meaning had already stuck. The nickname, the Gem State, comes straight from that fabricated translation, though the geology backed it up later: Idaho star garnets are found in gem quality in only one other place on earth, India.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #14 of 50
• Admitted: 1890
• Capital: Boise
• Largest city: Boise
• Time zones: Mountain and Pacific
• Nickname: Gem State
• State bird: Mountain Bluebird

Bordering states

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