Evel Knievel's Snake River Jump, 1974
Near Twin Falls, Idaho
On September eighth, nineteen seventy-four, Robert Craig Knievel climbed into a steam-powered rocket he called the Skycycle X-Two and pointed it at the far rim of the Snake River Canyon. What happened next was watched by somewhere between fifteen thousand and forty thousand spectators on site, and by millions more on closed-circuit television at arenas and theaters across the country.
Knievel had been building toward this moment for years. He was the most famous daredevil in America, a man who had broken nearly every bone in his body jumping motorcycles over cars and fountains and buses. But the Snake River jump was different in scale and ambition. The canyon is nearly a mile wide at the jump site, which sits just north of town. No motorcycle could clear that. He commissioned aerospace engineer Robert Truax to design the rocket, a steam-propelled vehicle that would launch from a ramp on the south rim, arc across the canyon, and land on the north side.
The launch went wrong almost immediately. A parachute deployed prematurely, possibly from a safety mechanism triggered by vibration, and the Skycycle drifted back toward the south canyon wall. Knievel survived. The vehicle, dangling from its chute, settled into the canyon just above the river's edge. Had the river been higher, or the chute failed completely, the outcome would have been fatal.
The event was simultaneously a spectacular failure and a commercial triumph. Promoter Bob Arum sold the event to several hundred theaters and arenas on closed-circuit television at about ten dollars a ticket, one of the largest paid television events of its time. Knievel himself called it a failure and said he would try again. He never did.
The launch ramp has been removed, but a replica site marker and overlook sit near the original location on the canyon rim north of the Perrine Bridge. The jump turned Twin Falls into a dateline that appeared in newspapers worldwide and cemented the canyon as something more than a geological feature: a stage.
