Dickshooter Creek Wild and Scenic River

Dickshooter Creek is a tributary of Deep Creek in southwestern Idaho. 9.3 miles of the stream (the entire streambed in Owyhee River Wilderness) is designated Wild.

The Dickshooter Creek area is dominated by a mixture of high, steep and eroded rough brown, red, or blackish cliffs, often glazed with light green-to-yellow micro-flora. Talus slopes offer displays of yellow-to-green sagebrush-bunchgrass and/or dark green juniper, as well as rough-textured reddish rhyolite and blackish basalt rubble fields.

Spring waterflows bring brownish high water and rich riparian vegetation. Summertime low flows are usually tinted light green and brown channel colors and expose the whitish stream-bottom gravel and boulders. Dickshooter Creek sees good waterflow in the spring and early summer, until all the snowmelt is gone. Then the stream dries into a string of small ponds that are refilled only by summer and fall rain. At no time is the stream floatable.

A product of extensive volcanic activity during the Miocene Epoch (24 to 5 million years ago), the region is part of the largest concentration of sheer basalt/rhyolite canyons in the western United States. Other rivers in the Owyhee Uplands drainage area also designated Wild and Scenic include Battle Creek, the mainstem of the Owyhee River, South Fork of the Owyhee River, Deep Creek and Red Canyon Creek.