Idaho

I don’t have a ‘bucket list’.  In fact the very expression makes me squirm for some reason, but I’ve just done something I never thought I’d do, spent a week biking almost all the way across the N. Idaho Panhandle with the Vernon Outdoors Club.  It was more fun than I feared it would be.  I’ve discovered that I keep myself moving by telling myself I won’t do things or if I do do them I won’t finish them and then when I find myself with others actually doing them, I do finish, most of the time, and actually like it.  So I’m not a self-starter, but I choose my friends carefully and carry on with them.  It has worked so far.

Priscilla picked me up at 7:00am on Sunday, September 11, 2011, a fateful day to cross the Canada/US border.  But aside from choosing the slowest of the 3 lanes, we had no problems there.  Our GPS, however, was a different story.  Priscilla and I seemed to be on the same wavelength, a somewhat quixotic one perhaps, but compatible. Tom Tommissina, on the contrary, was tuned to a different one.  She kept nagging at us to take routes we didn’t want to follow until we turned down her volume and finally shut her off.  The rest of the trip was fun.  We had a delicious lunch in a Mexican Family Restaurant in Colville, Washington, drove through some lovely scenery and arrived at our ‘villa’ in time for dinner.  Our accommodation was a rabbit warren of places, each with a name, ‘The Backwoods’, ‘The Villa’ and 2 other equally exotically named units all in what had been one lot in the town of Kellogg, Idaho.  We shared our dinners with the 3 women in ‘The Backwoods’, so each only cooked once.  We had great food, cheap good wine and hot tubs every night.  That luxury combined with the fact that the rides were not as hard as I had feared they would be made the whole week a surprising delight.

The Monday ride, however, did begin with something I had not given enough thought to, the 1.7mile long Saint Paul Pass, otherwise known as the Taft Tunnel.  That distance sounds like nothing until you enter with no light except the pathetic glow of a few LED lights on the brim of your bike helmet.  Within seconds, it was pitch dark, wet with water running in gutters on each side and cold.  I became quickly disoriented and almost wobbled off the bike before I fixed my eyes on the red tail light of the person in front of me, clenched the handle bars and my teeth and carried on to the end.  About a week earlier I had laughed at a cartoon about the light at the end of the tunnel being turned off because of cutbacks, but by the time I pedaled out of the Taft, that joke had lost it’s punch.  I was never so happy to see the light and feel the warm dry sun.  The rest of this Route of the Hiawatha; across the Bitteroot Mountains between Idaho and Montana, over 7 high trestles and through 10 much shorter and dryer tunnels; was wonderful and only slightly tainted by the knowledge of the fact that we would be going back through the Taft at the end. 

We biked every day and did the whole of the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes, from Plummer to Mullen.  That is, some of us did.  Priscilla and I carried on as we began, a bit less than seriously.  There were among us some who wanted to tick off every mile, but we managed to miss a few.  One day, we were the only ones who parked at the right trailhead but we didn’t finish the route.  The next day, we left the car at the wrong place and consequently missed most of the glorious downhill.

Of course we became the butt of jokes, but our skin is tough, unfortunately not quite tough enough on the butt end, however.  Five days of biking took there toll there.

Two of the highlights of the trip were on Tuesday.  We biked until about 2:00pm and then took a tour of an abandoned silver mine near Wallace.  Our guide was a crusty old miner who was full of vitality in spite of a career underground that would have killed me.  Once we were down in the shaft, he turned on some of the machines and turned off the lights and gave us a sense of the dark and the noise and the heavy work.   And we didn’t experience the heat that they have to endure in the deeper parts of the mines.  Silver has made a lot of money for the area, but they have paid.  All along the trails were signs warning of the poisons in the water and ground as a result of the heavy metals in the tailings leaching out of the many high slag hills.  After the tour, we went to a brewpub and drank.  The ale was very hoppsy, as Jim would have said.  We talked to the owner, and he gave us a tour of his huge stainless steel vats.  So there is more to the Vernon Outdoors Club than coffee and ice cream.

On our drive home we ignored Tom Tommissina again and crossed the Grand Coulee Dam.  This time we chose the fastest line at the border and ate in the car, so we arrived in Vernon in record time, even after a stop to shop at Lulu Lemon in Kelowna.  That care package is getting close to complete, Jay.

Outside the Ranch Chico, a family Mexican restaurant in Colville, Washington.

Someone exiting the Taft Tunnel, lucky guy.

Just outside a shorter tunnel

Priscilla and I had this picture taken as proof that we started at the Black Rock Trailhead, in the right place at the right time for once.

A view on the Route of the Hiawatha

Another 

A little bit of Mexico in Wallace, Idaho

Russ, our lively guide, in the silver mine near Wallace.  The canary in the cage never was alive. 

A bridge across Lake Coeur d' Alene.  If you click on the picture, you'll see that it says that jumpers will be prosecuted.  As the water is shallow, it reminded me of lines from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid":  "Jump."  "I don't swim."  "Are you kidding?  The fall will kill you."

They make big bugs in Idaho

Priscilla and I are reflected in this one's chest.