I went to Idaho to ride with Mill.

[Guidedawg]

I love reading trip reports of any type.

I always appreciate the fact that someone takes the time to take a picture and write up a few words, even for a trip around the neighborhood.  It helps to share the experience and always encourages riding.

But then there are the trip reports that you just KNOW are going to be epic.

Yours are always those type of reports that one eagerly awaits like a kid getting this month's superhero comic issue.

So count me in as one who loves to read your adventures and am even willing to forgive you for suckering me in with this bit:

The next morning, before I was awake, I heard some sound. Some strange sound. I was now 1/2 awake, or maybe just 1/3 awake, and I was trying to sort through things my ears were funneling to my brain. It took a minute but I figured out what it was.

It was The Police.

[Brian A]

Thanks much for the kind words.

I have been out of town a few days with work stuff so no recent update to the ride report. I hope to remedy that tonight.

[Brian A]

Back in the ride report saddle now and as I think about starting Day Two I realize I skipped a few pics from Day 1.

So........

Somewhere along the way, I believe it was as we got close to Cambridge, we stopped on the side of the road so I could replace my GPS batteries.

The roads were dirt. Really dry dirt.
Really dry dusty dirt.

Bad dust.

Mill took his helmet and goggles off and I busted out laughing.


Bad dust. Really bad dust.

Here, see for yourself.






(You don't get stuff like this on the interstate.)

[Brian A]

Friday morning. Day Two.

Idaho is on Mountain Time so that put my body clock an hour ahead of the local time. I had slept great and woke up about 6:30 local time. Mill was still sound asleep.

I got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower. The little sliding window in the bathroom had been left cracked overnight and the bathroom was pretty cool. (temps outside were somewhere in the upper 30's or so.)

I turned the knob that made the bathroom heater come on.

It was an old, resistive type baseboard heater. It heated by convection. No fans or blowers or anything. It made hot air and the hot air would rise and circulate. The heater made a few tinkling sounds as the little metal fins woke up.

I stood there for a minute or two in my shorts, waiting for the heat to begin to drift up. There is something about it that I enjoy. Being cold and hovering around whatever heat source it is, waiting to feel the warmth. Especially so when it is an old, simple heater like the ones in the hotel room and the bathroom. The warm air doesn't come from some machine in the attic or in the basement, forced through a pipe to then blow out of a hole in the wall with a louvered vent over it.

No. This heat come from that thing "right there". That old row of metal fins that got hot and in turn made me warm. Yeah. I liked that.

The tinkling and popping had stopped and the warm air was rising now. The bathroom began to warm up.

I showered, dried off, put on fresh undies and socks, then went to wake Mill.

Once Mill had showered we got our gear on and loaded the bikes. It would definitely be a cool start to the day but the sky was clear blue and we knew it would warm to be a great day.

We rode a mile or so down the road and stopped at a hardware store so I could buy some 'just-in-case batteries" for my SPOT tracker and my Garmin GPS.

Next stop was a mile or so later for breakfast. We stopped at The Alpine Pantry.
I was an organic/eco-friendly/"hippy"(?) type place. But, the folks were real nice and the food was good.

Outside in the parking lot I walked across the side street to look at the dam for Payette Lake. It sure was a small dam. Looked like something you'd see on stream, holding back a pond, not a dam for a big lake like Payette Lake. I thought I took a picture but I don't find one. So I'll resort to Google. (below)

After breakfast we backtracked past the hardware store and past the Scandia Inn and headed due east out of McCall on Lick Creek Road.

Just a mile out of town we were in the forest and riding along the north shore of Little Payette Lake. There wasn't much water in the lake. At least from what we could see. I don't know if it a seasonal thing or drought related or what, but the water was waaayyy away from the lake bank.

There were thousands and thousands (and then more thousands) of dead trees lining the bank in all directions, and countless stumps in the areas that would have been shallow water had the lake been at full pool.

We stopped for a few pics.








Soon after we pulled away from Little Payette Lake we would ride into what was to be - by far- the best stuff I had seen in Idaho. And some of the best stuff I have seen anywhere outside of Ecuador. 

Fun roads through beautiful mountain views in beautiful forests.

I think a lot of it was due to the fact that what I had routed I thought was National Forest Road 104, was in fact National Forest PACK TRAIL 104. It was for horses and hikers. Not two guys on motorcycles. So..... a few minutes looking at the Garmin and a new route was decided on. It turned out to be another case of "Making our own good luck."

And by golly, we were making some serious good luck.

[Brian A]

The pic in the post above - with Mill and I squatting in front of our bikes - was our first "scenic stop" of the day.

The scenery had turned dramatically different after just a few miles of riding. After we left the north shore of Little Payette lake, our FS road turned north and in no time at all we were in beautiful forest and mountains. It was really pretty stuff. The road cut right through the forest, with tall Fir trees lining the road on both sides.

The sun had warmed the air up nicely but in the shadows it was still cool. Every now and then you could smell the forest. What a great way to be spending a day-in-the-life!

The mountains were, for lack of a better way of describing it, real "close". You could see them from what felt like an up-close-and-personal distance. You could see many of the small scale features that are often lost to distance. You could see the rocks and the trees and the bushes that all served to make up the unique character of every individual peak.

We were in the Payette National Forest and I was loving it.

The Payette national Forest covers 2.3 million acres and makes up the largest component of the Frank Church - River of No Return Wilderness Area, which is the second largest wilderness area outside of Alaska. The Payette sits on top of the Idaho Batholith - the largest body of granite rock in the US.

The Payette National Forest ain't no slouch. It is quite legit.

So back to our first stop seen in the pic.... it was there I looked at my GPS and realized we had passed (what I thought was) our right turn. I was a bit puzzled because I knew I had not passed a right turn. In any event, we headed back from whence we had come and low-and-behold I was correct. We had not passed a right turn. What we had passed was the starting point of the hiking/horse trail that I had routed as if it were a FS road.

Ok, time to make some good luck.

In a minute or so a new route was identified and displayed on my GPS and we turned our bikes to head back down the road, past our first stop and on to what was to be some spectacular stuff.

[Brian A]

It was inevitable and unavoidable that I would make the comparison to Colorado. I guess the same would be the case for anybody who had been fortunate enough to ride a week in the Colorado mountains then follow that up a month later with 3 days in Idaho.

About 4 miles or so after leaving the trail-that-isn't-a-road, we pulled over for some pictures.

I am pretty sure it was at that stop that I made my first real, conscious comparison and brought it up for discussion.

I explained to Mill...... I have, for a very long time, been fascinated by places like this. Very rocky (granite) mountains with trees and bushes and the like, growing right up amongst all the rocks. Places of extreme contrast: The hard, heavy, massive, impressive rocks and boulders and peaks of granite infiltrated by Fir trees and flowers and grass and bushes and the occasional mountain lake.
It wasn't the forest.
It wasn't just rough, rocky mountain slopes and peaks.
It was the forest growing in and on the rough, rocky mountains.

Like grass that somehow manages to take hold and grow in a crack in the concrete in the middle of the road, the trees and flowers and grass and bushes had taken purchase and grew in what appeared to be nothing but fields of granite.

For me, these places always seemed to have been viewed from a distance. Pretty, very pretty to LOOK AT, but I had never had the chance to BE IN IT.

Until that morning.




It was one of my favorite stops during my 3 days in Idaho. We walked out onto/into the rocks and trees. Maybe 50 -75 yards, just enough to get away from the road and to be more "in the middle" of it all and take some more pictures.







It was during our discussion, when I was comparing and contrasting Idaho with Colorado, that I used the word that was the best word I could come up with to describe how it was riding in these mountains -vs- Colorado mountains: Intimate.

It is hard to describe and hard to explain, but riding in Idaho already had the feeling of being more intimate. I just felt closer to everything. The views so far had not been as vast and the mountains as massive as what Colorado had provided. Idaho felt more..... intimate. I felt closer to everything. I could see it all better and could touch some of it better. I could smell it better. It felt warmer. More inviting.

If Colorado was the famous, expensive restaurant, that served a $30 burger on a fancy plate with waffle cut fries and craft ketchup, and a high dollar beer in a frosty mug, then Idaho was the Ola Inn Cafe.
Creaky wood floors and a $5.25 burger that trumped the fancy burger, with regular fries (with a bit of peel left on them) and ketchup in a squirt bottle that went "pssttt-puf-puf-puf" when you squeezed it to squirt ketchup into the basket with a wax paper liner, and a canned Coke poured over ice in a plastic tumbler.
(Maybe one of the best kept secrets when it comes to an outstanding burger.)

They're both burgers and the extras. And, they are both good. It's just a matter of which you prefer.

On that morning, I was preferring the Ola Inn Cafe approach.

I was preferring the intimacy that was Idaho.
(Maybe one of the best kept secrets when it comes to outstanding dualsport riding.)

[Mulley]

Having spent time riding both Idaho and Colorado. Brian nailed the comparison. Oh, and Idaho is far more desolate and spread out.

Great report. I'm finished with the burger, what's for dessert?

[Brian A]

Thanks Mulley.

Even though it was just three days, there' still a lot more to come.

Oh yeah. Video too.  ;)

Oh yeah...one more thing. Mulley is right. Idaho is in fact, in many areas, an extremely desolate place. We rode 10 miles short of 600 miles and didn't put even a minor dent it covering the state.

I had not realized prior to planning and then being there and riding, just how much wilderness is in Idaho.

You could easily get very far away from anything, and that "anything" might not amount to much. And gas stops/range could be a major factor (read: problem) if you did not plan well. I doubt there are many places you could go in Alabama and not be within 50 miles of a gas station.

I suspect it would be pretty easy in Idaho to find many areas where there is no gas within 100 - 150 miles, and likely a lot further in many areas.

[Brian A]

Mill and I spent a few minutes there discussing Idaho.

I thought then, and still do, it is a remarkably overlooked state. The only reason I knew much of anything about it ahead of time, other than potatoes and much of Napoleon Dynamite was filmed there (Preston, Idaho), I knew because of reading and talking about dualsport riding.

You never hear a family say "We're going to IDAHO for vacation!" Well, maybe some have heard that, but I never have. It's a shame really. It's a beautiful state with more outdoors stuff to see and do than you can shake a stick at.


I knew from keeping in touch with Mill since his move, there is an untold number of miles of very, very difficult single track in Idaho. But, as I mentioned earlier, this ride wasn't about that. This was 3 days of covering miles and seeing as much as I could see in 3 days. We did take the occasional detour to hit a few miles of single track or double track, and some roads we chose over the 3 days were really pretty challenging. Rocky and steep and fun! But, the vast majority of our riding could have been accomplished in a decent pickup truck. It would not have been NEARLY as much fun, but it would still be some beautiful scenery to take in.



Our ride took us across a mountain ridge and down the side of a long stretch of mountains on our left, with another on our right. The road gave us spectacular views all the way down the canyon. It was a miles-long ride and every mile was spectacular. This was - once again - Idaho at its intimate best. We were not viewing from a great distance, taking in vast, majestic vistas. We were right there in it. Everything - rocks, trees, mountains, bushes - encroached on the road, as if you could have stopped the bike, gotten off and within a few minutes walk, be climbing (or trying to climb!) one of the mountains.






Before our lunch stop we rode through one of many areas we would visit that had suffered devastating forest fires in recent years. By recent, I'd say with the last 5-15 years. Several of the these burned areas we huge. Tens of thousands of acres and some up to hundreds of thousands of acres.

I was awed by the beauty. Thousands upon thousands of dead tree trunks, with gnarly branches still jutting out here and there, stood as charred, black witness to the infernos that had raged there at one time. But - and it is a significant 'but' - nature had shifted into overdrive and the forest was running wide open regenerating itself. Everywhere you looked the ground was covered in new growth. Trees and bushes and flowers and grasses, everywhere.




It made me think again, as I have thought in the past, I am not convinced wildfires are always the devastating force of nature we "feel" they are. We see the fires raging on the TV, and see the pics of the smoke enveloping towns, and sadly the loss of life and property that can result, but after all is said and done, it really is just nature running its course. We tend to think/feel it is a horrific loss because we see all the beautiful trees being burned to a crisp and know of the loss of wildlife as well. So, I guess on some level it is a horrible thing. But nature has little regard for our views of what is good and what is bad. When I saw the floor of the forest of burned trees covered in new growth, I had to accept that nature was quite capable of taking care of itself.
New trees were everywhere. Not all of them would make it to adulthood and for those that did, there was a reasonable chance that someday they might suffer the same fate as their parents and grandparents. And then it would be the next generation's chance to have a go at it.




This is a pic Mill took. I am inside the little red circle.




See, I told you so!




Back on the road. Our route had meandered a little more north from our first stops, then turned east for a few miles, then south for a good ride along the banks of The South Fork of the Little Salmon River. It was all great.

A road sign I doubt we'll ever see in Alabama.
South Fork of the Little Salmon River.



We stopped for a break at a little roadside information stand thing. One of those big boards with a little slanted roof over it, protecting a display of maps and info about the area. We had been riding in areas with lots of Ponderosa Pines. Beautiful, stately trees.





It was at this stop that we decided to take a turn to the right, as it seemed to offer a nice alternate to the road we were on, and would tie in to the same road further on down the way. We hadn't gone far when came across another option, so we took it. We left the road fora nice ride out through the forest and mountains on a doubletrack trail. We stopped a few times to take some photos. It sure was a pretty area.



The trail ran for about 8-10 miles and then dumped us out back on the road. We motored on.

Lots of hours of daylight remained and we were to make the best of them.

[Argh Oh]

An excellent report as always Brian. Your insights make a great read and your pics capture your words. Good stuff.

[Ryanbroome]

So where did the KLR come from?

[Brian A]

So where did the KLR come from?

My carry on bag. I am a very efficient packer!

Srsly, Mill ran across an ad on Boise Craigslist. A guy runs a small scale rental business out of his home garage. I contacted him and arrangements were easily made. I think it was $90/day and the bike was in very good shape.

[Ryanbroome]

Thanks. This is getting me interested in doing something similar with the wife. I may need that info one day.

Carry on

[Brian A]

Since Ryan broached the subject, I guess now is as good a time as any to share a discussion Mill and I had. Maybe especially so as the discussion took place at the stop we had just left - the one with the map and display info, where I took the picture of the Ponderosa Pine.

It was there that I mentioned to Mill my thoughts involving my disappointment (for lack of a better word) that more people don't get out and experience what we were experiencing and see the stuff we were seeing. Admittedly, at that time I was struck by the beauty of Idaho, but the same could be said for Colorado and many other places.

All of us here, as motorcyclist, share some degree of "adventurous spirit". Or so it would seem to me.

We are willing -indeed often eager - to forgo the comfort of the confines of a car or truck or SUV, in favor of the excitement and rewards we experience on two wheels. The risks are often greater and conveniences often not nearly as accessible. But the rewards, to us, outweigh all others and we find a great sense of satisfaction and contentment when we are on a motorcycle.

The adventurous spirit runs strong in some. A powerful river that pushes hard.
In others, it is not as strong. A gentle stream ridden to relax and find an escape.

So yeah, regardless of the power, I believe that adventurous spirit lives inside all of us who ride.

And that is what I brought up to Mill. I wish more could find a way to do what we were doing. I realize that many who might otherwise do so have families and obligations that would make such an "adventure" a real challenge to arrange. And in many cases, given the financial obligations of life, the ability to afford such could be a real challenge.

But the rewards are many if one can manage it.

For the record, the entire trip (Air fare, bike rental, hotels, food, misc.) cost me about $1,500.00


We have a large number of folks here at BamaRides who ride a lot and have done some awesome stuff over the years. But, maybe there is one who thinks about doing something a bit more. Something outside the bounds they have drawn for themselves. Something more adventurous.

About 3 or 4 years ago, one picture was THE spark that lit the fire for me. It was Donovan "riding" the alien mailbox in Nevada. That pic flipped my switch and I knew I had to get about the business of "going".

While I am NOT presumptuous enough to think that I will do the same for others, I hold out the hope that I might, someday, do the same for at least one somebody. In fact, it is with some humility that I wonder..... Maybe one segment of a ride report will "click" with somebody who reads it and they make the decision to start planning and arranging.

Maybe one pic will be the one that flips someone's switch and then they get about the business of "going".

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The stop did not come until later on in the day, but the pictures that resulted are some of my favorites I have ever taken while out riding. They rival some of my favorites from Ecuador.

The story will come later, but for now, I'll share the pic.

This picture, even now, gives me goose bumps when I look at it. Like the pic of me standing on my bike on that mountain in Ecuador, it captures, in a fraction of a second, an image that sums up all that words would fail to deliver.

There is no way to be there and do it, unless you are there and doing it.

And when you are, it is the best thing in the world.

Mill. In Idaho.

[Brian A]

For the record - if you want to ask or discuss anything about the Colorado trip, or the Idaho trip, or even the Ecuador trip, do not hesitate to send me a PM.

And since I rode Colorado and Ecuador with Mulley, I'd bet he would say the same.