Snake River Canyon — September 8, 1974
The canyon is about a quarter of a mile across at Twin Falls, Idaho. On 8 September 1974, Evel Knievel strapped himself into a steam-powered rocket and tried to cross it.
The machine
It was not a motorcycle. The Skycycle X-2 was a rocket, designed and built by Robert Truax, a former United States Navy engineer, after an earlier prototype developed with Douglas Malewicki. It ran on superheated steam. Knievel sat in it rather than on it, harnessed in, pointed up a ramp cut into the canyon rim roughly a mile west of Shoshone Falls.
He could not release the harness himself once he was strapped in. Remember that detail.
What happened
The X-2 left the ramp and climbed. Photographs from that afternoon show it clearing the far rim.
Then the parachute opened — far too early. The cause was a design flaw in the mechanical cover holding the parachute: it hadn't properly accounted for base drag, the suction behind a body moving fast through air. With the chute out, the rocket was no longer flying. It was drifting.
The wind took it back toward the side it had launched from, and it came down at the bottom of the canyon, near the water's edge. Knievel got out and walked away from it.
He was blunt afterwards about how close it had been. Had the X-2 come down in the river rather than on the rocks, he could not have freed himself from the harness. It would have killed him.
Ten years later
Knievel came back to Twin Falls in 1984 for a ceremony on the canyon rim, looked out at the thing that had beaten him, and said this:
“This great old Snake River Canyon is still standing here. God has not moved it one single inch and that take off-ramp is still on the edge where we can see it — and I don't see no big long line of daredevils standing here wanting to jump across it.”
— Evel Knievel, Twin Falls, Idaho, 1984
The ramp is still there. So is the canyon.
Why it still matters
Snake River is the jump people remember even when they can't name another one, and it is the only one he is famous for not completing. That is the point of him. He told a national television audience exactly what the odds were, in detail, and then got in anyway.
The footage is ours
Every photograph and every frame of film shot at the Snake River Canyon that day is owned outright by K and K Promotions, along with every Evel Knievel® trademark and the rest of the jump archive. When you see Snake River artwork on a shirt or a poster somewhere else, it came from our archive — licensed or not.
Everything we sell from that day is licensed, and it comes from the people who hold the rights.
