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Day 0: Spokane, Washington

The boys flew in that afternoon, and by boys, I mean men, literally my boss and another close coworker. But on these trips, we’re not coworkers, we’re just boys who like to bike. It feels right to say “boys”, too, because there’s a palpable excitement, a youthful love of gearing up and exploring new trails.

Since the start of the trail was only 90 minutes away across the Idaho border from Spokane, I got to play host. We spent a few hours assembling bikes in our living room. It was good for Mickelle to see all of us in action. We’re funny and meticulous and geek out over little details like waxed chains, pocket-sized torque wrenches, and careful pack-jobs that got the bikes across the country without incident.

We ran to REI for a few last-minute supplies, including a canister of bear spray. This earned us an animated demonstration and fifteen minutes of bear stories from an eager employee. If this were a screenplay, my mention of bear spray would serve as a bit of obvious foreshadowing, with the feared beast rearing its teeth in act three. Alas, no bear would cross our path. However, hanging on the wall outside our motel the first night were hundreds of polaroids of hunters and their victims going back 30+ years. And what had they shot? A whole lot of bears (not to mention wolves, giant cougars, and elk). So the bear spray was probably a good precaution.

Day 1: St. Maries, ID to Avery, ID | 48 Miles

Fully equipped, we drove to St. Maries, Idaho, a small, weather-worn logging town on the south end of Lake Coeur d’Alene, the type of town with pictures of graduating seniors flying on light poles and a 20-foot-tall statue of a lumberjack in front of the elementary school. St. Maries is the kind of place that takes on a different look when it’s sunny or cloudy. It happened to be a bit windy and overcast, casting the town in a bit of a depressing light, and we parked unceremoniously at a gas station off the main street so we could all use the restroom and attach our bags.

But by the time we were making our way on the gravel railroad grade road, the sun was peaking through the clouds, and already we caught a view of the pine-covered mountains that would be our backdrop for the next four days.

The gravel road followed the Saint Joe River, “The Shadowy Saint Joe”, as it’s known, 48 miles upriver to Avery, our destination for the night, a small community comprised of a train museum, post office, fly fishing shop, and motel/store, plus a few other residential and rental properties. Above Avery, the Saint Joe carves through steep mountains with a “Wild and Scenic” river designation. Below Avery, it’s merely a “Recreational” river. Basically, this meant the river was rather tame and accessible for most of our ride, rolling slowly through the valley with small communities, RV parks, and the like on either shore. Still, we didn’t see any other bikes and were passed by only a handful of cars (a paved road ran parallel to the rail grade on the other side of the river).

The town of Calder marked the halfway point on the day. It had little more than a few houses and the Calder Store. Researching stops for food and water is important on a trip like this. The Calder Store made life difficult by posting three different sets of hours depending on whether you looked at Google, Facebook, or their website. Feeling sensible, I tried calling, and an annoyed woman told me they usually open at 12:30, but it sort of depends, and maybe they’d have food ready. Well, they were open, but Taco Tuesday didn’t start until 3 pm, though the lettuce was already out on the table at 1 pm, wilting in the stale air. We opted for a Gatorade and a Snickers bar on the porch.

The trail on this first day was by far the bumpiest. Parts of the road had the familiar washboards known to any Inland Northwest gravel rider. Other sections, like that of our last thirteen miles into Avery, were just plain rocky. Combined with a constant headwind, though this would be our shortest day, it may have been the most exhausting. A few miles of rocky terrain isn’t bad. 48 miles of it shakes your arms and shoulders until previously undiscovered muscles start to ache and twitch.

Those last miles into Avery were beautiful, though. The valley disappeared, sending us deeper into the mountains, and the trail featured a few small hills, breaking up the monotony of a previously long, flat 35 miles. It was barely 65 degrees in the middle of July in Avery and getting cooler as the sun set. We ate sandwiches and burgers on the deck of the fly shop overlooking the river, then retreated to the motel for a well-earned sleep.

Day 2: Avery, ID to Saint Regis, MT | 56 Miles

The motel hostess told us there would be a line out the door at 7 am for her breakfast offerings. We saw her walk by our window at 6:50. There was no line, but the “Dirty Joe”, aka hashbrowns, sausage and gravy, with a fried egg on top, did hit the spot. Soon, we were off on what we anticipated to be the most scenic day of the trip. We were not to be disappointed.

The first nine miles took us further through the mountains along the north fork of the Saint Joe. Here again, two roads ran on either side of the river, this time both unpaved. We took the recommended Moon Pass road which, while not technically the rail grade, did weave us through seven tunnels and gave us an elevated view of the river.

The mountains seemed bigger here than the day before. Turning a corner brought us face to face with a huge wall of pine, some of it shaded, some of it glowing in the sunrise. Again, we had the trail to ourselves, seeing no one but a few campers down at the river level.

The trail featured similar rough gravel as the day before. The wind had subsided, and we climbed a gentle 700 feet before reaching the base of the famed Route of the Hiawatha. The Hiawatha is a 13-mile trail complete with another batch of tunnels, one of them 1.6 miles long and entirely unlit (very eerie and cold), as well as seven elevated train trestles that elevate you 250 feet off the ground. Most riders take the Hiawatha from the top and catch a shuttle bus back up. Either way you ride it, the trail is spectacular. The route makes a giant “U”, going along one side of the mountain before flipping around and tackling the other. This means that from below, you can look up at the riders across the ridge making their descent, and from above, you’re given a view of the size and length of the trestles as they span the narrow creeks below.

We passed a trickle of riders the first five miles, but nearing halfway, the hordes of downhill riders began to flow along the trail. The uphill rider is always a great curiosity to the downhill rider, especially when the uphill rider has a few bags attached to their bike. Of course, the uphill rider feels superior in every way, demonstrating their fitness on the 1000-foot climb to the top.

I first rode the Hiawatha top-to-bottom last autumn and was admittedly a little underwhelmed. The views were stunning, but the ride was easy. The gradient is steep enough that pedaling is nearly optional. And with a shuttle waiting to take you back to the top, there’s no real effort exerted. I suppose this bugged me a little. Now, having done the Hiawtha a few times, I better appreciate it for what it is, namely, a remarkable way for riders of all skill and fitness to witness a world-class bike trail and remarkable mountain vistas. But of course, we still felt pretty smug biking uphill.

The boys bought a little merchandise from the booth at the entrance, and after another Gatorade and bag of chips, we began our 31-mile downhill descent to Saint Regis, Montana, on the Route of the Olympian (I’m not sure why so many towns and geographical features are named “Saint” around here).

After basically a day and a half of uphill riding, the fast descent was welcome and exciting. Our average speed went from 12 mph to 19 mph, at least for a few miles. We passed through one more tunnel (I believe that made 15 tunnels on the day), crossed the Old Dominion Trestle, and continued our fast progress to Saltese, MT for lunch.

Saltese is the first community in Western Montana coming across I-90. The estimated population is 10 or 19, depending on what source you believe. It has exactly one restaurant, the Old Montana Bar and Casino, and about three streets, one parallel to the interstate, one running up the mountain to the south underneath the train trestle, and another running up the mountain to the north.

A few miles after Saltese, the mountains opened up to another valley, and of course, the wind returned to blow directly in our faces. But the trail quality was decent and the weather not too hot. The final six miles into Saint Regis were extraordinarily bumpy, so we were anxious to get off the trail after 56 miles on the day.

Saint Regis has a little more variety in the way of food. We chose dinner at Winkie’s Diner and milkshakes at Huck’s Grill in the travel center/gas station. Our Airbnb had a hot tub and amazing beds, along with a waffle maker, giving us a free breakfast in the morning.

Day 3: Saint Regis, MT to Wallace, ID | 58 Miles

For the first 20 miles of the day, we essentially retraced our route to Saltese on the Olympian. This meant another round on the crappy gravel coming out of Saint Regis. Hooray. I would say that any repetition of a trail is less ideal; much of the fun of bikepacking is the novelty of a new day and a new trail. Yet it’s hard to complain about biking alongside a beautiful river and pine-covered mountains, and since none of us had biked this trail before yesterday, it still felt new.

We weren’t hungry enough for lunch in Saltese, and so we tried the only other food option, Mangold’s General Store. If you’re imagining a cute little country mercantile, don’t. It’s basically a tin shed with unboxed bulk snacks from Costco and a sign on the door suggesting real patriots don’t mask up for COVID.

After Saltese, we stayed on a frontage road instead of climbing back up to the Hiawatha, which took us to Taft, MT, which serves as little more than the freeway exit to access the forest road up to the Hiawatha and a seemingly permanent parking lot for road maintenance and construction vehicles working on I-90. Taft marked the start of a new trail, the Northern Pacific or NorPac Trail, that would take us up and over Lookout Pass. Lookout Pass is one of the oldest ski resorts in the country. A sign at the top described how Nordic immigrants would stop off the train on their way West and ski through the trees before it even became an official resort. It also marked the transition back into Idaho from Montana.

If day two had felt like the most scenic, day three felt like the most epic. One hallmark of rail trails in the USA is that they typically don’t offer much elevation gain. Our trip the year before, a six-day ride from Pittsburgh, PA to Washington, D.C., had featured only 4,000 ft of elevation gain over 330 miles, most of that on a nearly imperceptible rise to the Eastern Continental Divide.

We had climbed about 700 feet in the last 25 miles, and in the next eight miles, we would climb 1,400 feet. For the unfamiliar, while that’s some decent elevation gain, most of the way up averaged around 2-3% gradient, enough to feel like you’re climbing, but not enough to crush your legs. Still, there was a great feeling of accomplishment having reached the top (elevation 4,734 ft). If there was to be a most challenging part to our trip, this was it, even if the terrain and wind on day one hurt more. As we climbed, the landscape around us began to shift, the lush cedars and ferns giving way to subalpine firs. We passed huckleberry bushes (with a quick pitstop to pick a few), and as we neared the top, the trees became more sparse and the ground rockier. We stopped at the ski resort at the top for a few minutes, enjoying another cold Gatorade.

Of course, with every climb comes a descent, and we ripped through the next 20 miles down the mountain. Around 13 of that was on the gravel NorPac trail, flying past ski lifts and through narrow canyons of pine. Our arrival on the valley floor marked the conclusion of our gravelling. The next 73 miles would take us on the paved Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes. And how sweet it felt. Even with a headwind (of course, the winds had shifted), we were tearing down the bike path. By 3 pm, we had arrived in Wallace, ID.

Wallace is about the coolest, quirkiest town in the entire region. Once the center of the mining boom in Northern Idaho, Wallace was renowned for its debauchery in the form of a thriving alcohol and prostitution industry. Even as the rest of the country experienced prohibition and other moral restrictions in the progressive era, Wallace didn’t officially ban prostitution until 1991. It’s also the only city in the United States where the entire city center is on the National Register of Historic Places. We happened to stay in an old red church (more “saintly” experiences), really just the size of a house, that had been converted into an Airbnb. That night, we walked around town, enjoyed some sandwiches at Cogs and ice cream at Miners Market, and even caught a town block party, where a bunch of old ladies danced freely to the old 80s rock-n-roll tunes from the live band.

Day 4: Wallace, ID to Plummer, ID | 65 Miles

While day one had brought us into the mountains, day four would bring us out. We got an early start and enjoyed a gradual downhill for the next 10 miles into Kellogg before breaking with I-90 and the civilization that accompanies it, following the Coeur d’Alene river, instead. Pine-covered hills still marked our path for several miles and appeared off in the distance, but around halfway through the day, we entered a marshy, pond-covered area cutting through a rather uninhabited section of the trail. For about 35 miles, there were no towns, no gas stations, no stops for water. A scenic highway winds through the marshes, but never got close to intruding on our isolation.

This part of the trail was odd, especially through the marshes. While we had escaped the heat with unseasonably cool weather so far, the full Inland Northwest sun was beating on us today, and everything felt hot and dry. On some parts of the trail, there was no tree cover, and the trail stretched in a straight line almost as far as you could see, with swamps on either side of the path and low mountains in the distance. The wind had resumed its typical West-to-East direction and blew constantly in our face.

Moose sightings are fairly common in the marshy areas, and I had high hopes that we would see one, even turning to one of the guys as we neared the section and saying, “You know, if we’re going to see a moose, it will be in the next 30 miles.”

As we chatted and rode along at a steady 15 mph, a big brown shape suddenly jumped out not ten feet in front of us, making us slam on our brakes. It was a moose, a female moose! She scampered further up the trail a moment, unbothered by our near miss, and began chewing at leaves while we waited for our heart rates to calm down. She ate for a moment before turning further down a trail and hopping a fence like a cat.

After 50 miles, we finally reached Harrison, ID, a charming town on the southern shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene. We rode up the hill for lunch at the Cycle Haus (flatbread pizzas and lemonade), then went back to the lake level to rejoin the trail.

For the next seven miles, we followed the shore and eventually crossed over the other side on an enormous trestle that spanned the lake, the old bones of a former railroad. That took us into Heyburn State Park for a few minutes and eventually to our final climb of the trip, 800 feet over six miles through the forest and up into Plummer, ID, on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation.

It was a fitting way to end, one last little challenge in the throbbing heat of the day. A little over an hour later, we were back in Spokane, cleaning up the bikes and helping the boys pack up for their flights in the morning.

I love biking. I love the distance you can cover, the physicality of it, the pairing of man with a machine of his choosing he trusts will carry him on his journey. I love having friends who are willing to travel across the country to bike a few hundred miles on trails we know almost nothing about. I love the beauty and smell of pine, cedars, and cottonwoods. I’m glad I have a wife who supports me taking trips like these and didn’t get annoyed whenever I stared off in the distance the last few months, daydreaming about bikepacking.