MILE HI, ID

Location Overview
Mile Hi sits atop a ridge in the Big Creek drainage of central Idaho, within the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, roughly 25 miles northeast of Johnson Creek and about 10 miles west of where Big Creek meets the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. It's perched on top of a ridgeline, with the strip framed between a ridge to one side and steep ledges to the other. At around 5,831 feet elevation, it's one of the more remote and dramatic settings among Idaho's backcountry strips.

Camping & Recreation
There are no amenities or tie-downs at the strip itself, but pilots who make the trip in often treat it as a destination for a short hike and some time exploring the mountaintop terrain rather than an overnight base. Visitors have described spending an afternoon hiking around and exploring the area after landing. The surrounding Frank Church Wilderness offers broader backcountry recreation — hunting, hiking, and rugged, undeveloped terrain — but nothing is developed at Mile Hi itself.

Notes & Warnings
This is considered one of the most demanding strips in Idaho. It's a short, dog-legged, uphill, unmaintained airstrip, and the first 540 feet of it are unusable for landing, leaving only about 560 usable feet. Pilots land on runway 19 and take off on runway 1, but most of the strip cannot be seen during takeoff, so a prudent pilot studies the terrain on approach and even inspects it on foot before departing to maintain runway alignment. Erosion has eaten into the usable length over time, and a steep run-out area exists west of the runway 19 end if needed. It's only suitable for high-performance STOL aircraft flown by experienced mountain pilots, and factors like strong or shifting wind and high density altitude in an underpowered plane can make things much worse than they look. Forum pilots echo that success there comes down almost entirely to pilot skill and currency rather than aircraft type — it's very short, steep, challenging, hazardous, and unforgiving of mistakes.

History
Mile Hi is one of the "Big Creek Four" backcountry strips — along with Vines, Dewey Moore, and Simonds — all located inside a designated wilderness area. None of these strips were in regular use when the Central Idaho Wilderness Act created the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in 1980, so conservation groups have long argued they should have been closed permanently at that time. Instead, the Forest Service kept them open on an emergency-use-only basis, later loosening that under pressure from aviation groups and Idaho's congressional delegation. Through negotiations between the Idaho Aviation Association and the Idaho Division of Aeronautics, the Forest Service agreed to reopen the strips for "sporadic" use. Over time, though, Mile Hi in particular became something of an internet-famous bragging-rights strip, with pilots landing in groups and posting their exploits online — a trend that has fueled ongoing tension between backcountry aviators wanting access and wilderness advocates who see the increased traffic as eroding the area's wilderness character. Local volunteers, including the Idaho Aviation Association, have continued informal upkeep, such as maintaining the windsock at the field