I went to Idaho to ride with Mill.

[KrisCook]

[Brian A]

BINGO !!

That's the one that did it for me.  My initial desire had been to ride there and do the same thing. But plans morphed and there have been some great rides instead.  Maybe one day, but things are getting penciled in for 2016 and it's not in the cards for next year.

Thanks Kris.

[Brian A]

One more thing: When we left the roadside info stand and soon thereafter turned left onto the doubletrack trail that ran about 8-10 miles through the forest and mountains..... here is a Google screenshot, just to give an idea how great the area is.

Red is the info stand.
Yellow highlight is the doubletrack trail.

[jrobinson]

Brian, Thank you for putting in the time and effort to start adding back to what made bamarides great.

This thread has sparked an idea. I won't muddle up your thread, but know it's great threads like this that adds to why I'll do everything possible to keep bamarides going.

[Brian A]

Brian, Thank you for putting in the time and effort to start adding back to what made bamarides great.

No problem JR. It's a labor of love. Always has been. Always will be.
The greatest reward is if folks enjoy what I throw together.

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The doubletrack trail had been really good. Nothing too difficult but plenty fun enough to have made it a great diversion. The scenery was wonderful. Even though the roads we had been riding provided lots of "close encounters" with the forests and the mountains, the doubletrack had really let us be smack in the middle of it (reference Google screenshot above).

After the doubletrack we hit asphalt. Our ride took us down out of the mountains into some flat terrain and more areas that had seen forest fire at some time in the fairly recent past. And as before, new growth was abundant.



And on we rode. On to our lunch stop at Warm Lake.

Warm Lake is the largest natural lake in the Boise National Forest. It is a 640 acre lake at an altitude of 5,300 feet. There is camping there and some cabins to rent. I imagine it would be a nice place to spend a few days. We would spend about an hour there.

Mill and I bought a Coke and a snack at the store at the little lodge office place and sat at a picnic table behind it, looking out over the lake. Soon enough two guys sat down to join us. They were from Washington state and were on a week long ride through Idaho, then back home. They each rode a DRZ 400 and they had them loaded like they were off to the tip of South America. I have to give them credit, they had their act together and every means of stowage was utilized.

I noticed and asked and they confirmed: They didn't use GPS. Just maps and notes on paper. Truth is, that would work just fine (and did for them) since Idaho has fantastic maps for all the Forest Service roads and trails. But, I enjoy using the GPS with maps as an adjunct. Mill and I did use maps from time-to-time to get a better big picture view of where we were and where we wanted to go.

The Washington guys' rides.





With our Cokes and snacks in our bellies, we said good bye to the Washington guys and left Warm Lake.

Our afternoon ride took us through many high meadows. Pretty places. Very serene and peaceful looking. I kept looking to see a deer or something, but I never did.



Somewhere along the way were found ourselves back on dirt. We ran across an old, abandoned mining community. I reckon it was gold they sought. I always wonder how folks decided that THIS is the spot I want to start digging into a big wall of granite and look for me some gold!

However it was decided, they had a go at it and either found enough gold to pack up and leave, or didn't find enough so they packed up and left.







We rode though an area that I believe had seen decimation due to beetles. But, as was the case in the areas that had seen fire, nature was busy with the business of growing stuff to replace that which nature had seen fit to do away with.



The afternoon and the ride wore on and we were back on blacktop, headed in the direction of Stanley, which was to be our stop for the evening.

We pulled off at a roadside stop to take a break. The views were fantastic.




Behold the Sawtooth Mountains.






We pulled out of the rest area and pointed the front wheels towards Stanley. But prior to leaving we had thought... "Hey. Plenty of daylight left and we are just an hour from Stanley. Let's take a dirt road somewhere."

And so we did.

A few miles down the asphalt we turned left and meandered along a series of dirt roads that took us across a big field before returning us to the woods and some hills.

It was in this big field that we stopped for a few photos. I set up my camera on Mill's little twisty tripod thing and we took a few pictures. They are the ones which you have already seen. I'll share one more.

Just because you can never have too much awesomeness.




We pulled away from that stop and soon stopped again for another photo.

Did I mention Idaho is an incredibly beautiful state?



more to come....

[Ryanbroome]

We enjoy it greatly!

[Ryanbroome]

That last picture is by far the best I've seen. Also, thanks for the great story!

[Nice Goat]

Appreciate the photos and report, Brian.  It's also enjoyable reading your stuff.

[kdtrull]

Great visuals and reading...and thanks for sharing.

That is a remarkable camera.  I think I asked the same question on the old Ecuador report....Is that a point-n-shoot or an SLR?
Those are some of the sharpest images I've ever seen without some post-processing.

[Brian A]

Great visuals and reading...and thanks for sharing.

That is a remarkable camera.  I think I asked the same question on the old Ecuador report....Is that a point-n-shoot or an SLR?
Those are some of the sharpest images I've ever seen without some post-processing.

Thanks kind sir. It is a Fuji XP 65 from Walmart. I don't think they sell that same model any more.

And in the interest of full disclosure, most of the pics are tweaked a little. Mostly to deal with the difficulty digital cameras have with burn out. It varies a little from pic to pic, but in general the brightness/highlights is what needs addressing the most.

Other variables are massaged as needed. I try hard not to change the image to make it look significantly different from what was reality. My goal is to create a pretty picture, not a fake picture.

All-in-all, it does a good job for what was IIRC, about a $120 camera.

[Nice Goat]

Fake pictures are nice too, sometimes...

[Brian A]

Yep. I play around some as well.

About the furthest I stray from reality with what I share in RR threads, (and it's obvious when I do) is when I shoot a few pics using one of the built in filters in the camera. And then, I share those mostly just for a change of pace.

[Argh Oh]

Great as always Brian. When does your book get published?

[Brian A]

The view at our stop beside the old wooden fence was great. The weather was perfect, the air was crystal clear and every direction was something worth pausing a minute to enjoy.

We headed on down the dirt road and made a turn or two to insure we would wind up heading towards Stanley. It wasn't too far along the way that we ran across a single track trail. I looked on my Garmin GPS and was more than a little surprised to see it showed up there. A quick check indicated the trail would dump out back on the road, 3 or 4 miles from where we sat.

I guess it goes without saying we took the single track trail. It was really fun.

We rode through another area that had burned. This was a smaller area and didn't seem to have been fully consumed by fire. We paused for a picture. Mill took this one of me.

The obligatory "flipping him off" picture.



A mile or two later the trail ran into an open area and we started a small decent that would lead us back to the dirt road we had left a few miles back.

Another picture Mill took of me.



Back on the dirt road we motored on until we were dumped out onto asphalt again. We turned left for the short ride on into Stanley.

When we got to Stanley we pulled into a gas station to fill up. There were two guys there on big farkled out BMW GS. They asked if we had seen another rider anywhere along our way, maybe even stopped on the side of the road with a flat tire.

From what we could gather they had been with two other guys. One of them had managed to get a flat tire. The other non-present rider left to go get.............. are you ready for this?

A can of Fix-A-Flat.

Apparently all the farkles didn't include a way to plug a tire (I believe the GS uses tubeless tires) or fix/replace a tube if a tube was involved. We never understood how the two of them showed up at the gas station, one guy was on a search for Fix-A-Flat and the other poor soul was somewhere, alone, with a flat. I have to assume that eventually they all got hooked up together as I have never heard anything about a missing motorcycle rider, somewhere near Stanley, Idaho.

We got a room at a hotel and ate dinner in the attached restaurant.

Back in the hotel room we considered options for the next day.

Our final day.

I had two or three options already loaded on my GPS and we used those to create a new route that seemed to suit our fancy.

With plans settled on we hit the sack. Another good day of riding was not more than 12 hours away.

The view at dusk from our hotel.

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[Brian A]

Before we get to day 3, a short break to talk about...............


The Sawtooth Mountains.

Back in the early to mid 80's, while I was in school at The U of A, I watched The Today Show. I always enjoyed Willard Scott. He seemed a likable fella and just a general all-around nice guy.

To this day I have always remembered in the winter time, when Willard was going over the weather for the day, he would often mention the Sawtooth Mountains (along with The Bitteroots). 

Something about the name........ "The Sawtooths". It just created a mental picture in my head. I imagined, and probably even romanticized to some extent, what The Sawtooths would look like. Looking back now, I think maybe there was something of a dormant fascination with The Sawtooth Mountains. Nothing powerful enough to have ever driven me to make it a point to go see them, but something there. A little spark, just hoping maybe to get fanned into a flame one day?

I never remember knowing exactly where The Sawtooths were.

Just knew they were somewhere out west.

In the Rockies.

Somewhere.

While planning the trip to Idaho I never gave any thought to The Sawtooths. But once I got there it occurred to me that we might just be near enough I would get to see them.

Turns out we were and I did.

The Sawtooth Mountains cover an area of approximately 680 square miles. There are 57 peaks above 10,000 feet, with the highest being Thompson Peak at 10,751 feet. They were formed from two large bodies (batholiths) of granite: The Sawtooth batholith to the north and the Idaho batholith to the South. Their irregular, jagged, sharp peaks are beautiful and certainly merit the name:

The Sawtooth Mountains.



If it is possible to have a Bucket List item that you don't even know is a Bucket List item, then The Sawtooths would be at the top of that list for me.

I'll put a check mark by them either way.


if you have any interest here are two websites to check out: 
http://www.sawtoothcamera.com/   (explore the links to the camera and slideshows)
http://idahoptv.org/productions/idahoportrait/about/geology.html