Kidding on the square is the saying -
Kidding on the square is the saying -
I don't really get what you mean. Maybe it just didn't translate over text, but Ben Avery and Rio Salado are generally packed when I go. Are you joking are serious. I know there is close to a million people in the metro area of Boise, so you could either be joking or serious based on that.
Mike "Duke" Venturino did a piece a long time ago about how it's too late to move west and do what he did - and he's a whole lot younger than I am.
Boise is enough of a blot on the landscape that folks who live a fair distance away wouldn't drive
toward Boise for open land hunting and fishing - shooting and blasting but have to get
ever farther away - one decent indoor range folded and was absorbed by a chain but there is a tension between old timers who have access to land, a place to shoot, and newcomers who don't.
Folks haven't done enough to develop ranges - and recreation - while they could because too many could say
I've got mine and I don't care about yours so as the convenient places to shoot go away there will be little to replace them.
There are many otherwise pleasant communities that run to a lot of gray days (there are people who work in metro Seattle and commute by air from Boise) - Boise at least had escaped that but pollution is worse all the time - and there are many communities in Idaho with a history of really bad pollution be it from pulp mills or (agricultural) industries that put out so much smoke the visibility on the highway goes to zero at times so I'd hope it could be avoided but it flat goes with the territory.
The Internet will give plenty of historical weather data, not only for Boise but for Missoula and Bozeman and all the rest, but again the historical record will be changed by people - heat that wasn't so bad because it really was a dry heat may not be so dry in the city of the future and who knows what global warming will do for summer and winter climates.
As for neighborhoods the Statesman crime reports (Boise newspaper and TV stations are available on the web) will give some indication of low rent and high crime districts mostly quite a ways down the highway from the state capital but crips and bloods style violence is extending - presumably from Boise - into Ontario and Baker City in eastern Oregon - hard to escape it completely anyplace - folks I know who would routinely leave their keys in the car don't anymore. Time was I not only didn't lock my front door I couldn't - although the store bought door had a cut for a lock I didn't bother to put one in - now it's deadbolt all the way.
There is no Utopia. Neal Knox was the first person I ever heard mention "
bring your own money towns" - what I think of as one third millionaire
lone eagles and two thirds food stamps - I think he was speaking of Prescott. Jack O'Connor liked Lewiston ID - although Lolo did a lot for shooting sports in that town and the man is dead and the shop closed - among other reasons because except for occasionally making a scene at school board meetings and such Jack O'Connor got out of town a lot.
Hard to find an unspoiled place with jobs.
I try to avoid going there at all costs.
