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Health & Fitness

Road Adventures from Idaho to Montana

This Blog installment is a true road adventure. It will cover part of the 146 road miles between Elk City Idaho and Darby Montana.

There are no gas stations, no services and no cell phone coverage. What are there are cougars, bears and wolves. In fact most people I met there were packing a firearm due to the cougars and wolves being both numerous and aggressive. There are other hazards in the area such as falling dead trees, lightning strike zones, quicksand and more. A big problem on this trip was forest fires. The fires were on both sides of the road and numerous. At one campsite I even climbed a mountain to check the safety situation. I counted nine separate fires; still they were miles away so I judged the situation to be safe for the moment. 

The area is a vast collection of mountains and forest. It consists of three separate designated ‘wilderness’ areas that border one another.  They are the Gospel Hump Wilderness, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and the Wilderness of No Return. It takes up most of central Idaho. The last two named areas cover more than twice the land of Delaware and Rhode Island, combined.

The road I drove bisects these two wilderness areas. It is called “The Corridor”. To tell the truth there are stretches of this avenue where the term ‘road’ is an exaggeration.  It goes up and down more than a roller coaster. The Forest Service refers to it as a gravel road. This is not accurate. It is a dirt road with rocks in it and on it. At times it is even necessary to stop and personally clear the road of fallen rocks or trees. Being a mountain road it twists and turns on frequent switchbacks.  This makes for a lot of blind corners. 

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The Corridor has more tight curves than a dozen Brazilian bikini models. The road is also very narrow. Guardrails are non-existent. This combination makes on-coming traffic problematic to say the least.  Many times all that can be done is for one of the two drivers to back up to a turn out. Backing up on a mountain road is as fun as it sounds.

Along the way I stop numerous times to take photos, picnic, hike, bathe in a mountain stream, pick huckleberries, mountain climb and camp.  One campsite was at a place named Observation Point. You have a tremendous view of the wilderness from there. All day people would stop to take a picture or just to enjoy the view. Whenever the feeling came over me I would walk out of camp and stroll over to the spot and enjoy the vista. Heavy visitation and drought had turned the ground there to a fine powder. Under such conditions it was easy to see prints and trails.

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Tread marks of tires crisscrossed each other and there were so many boot prints over the area it looked like somebody had held a square dance.  While looking down at one tire track I noticed a boot print had overlaid it and inside the boot indentation was a fresh print of a cougar.  This meant the cougar print was the freshest track there. In fact the paw print had to be less than an hour old. It also meant a mountain lion had been less than 100 feet from my camp and had not been seen nor heard by me. 

At this point I realized that my 38 Smith & Wesson revolver had been left on the tailgate of my pickup.  This realization was followed by the feeling of embarrassment and concern so I strolled back to the truck to fetch my weapon, all the while calling out, “here kitty, kitty”. 

One side note, you might remember from a past Blog that by tradition my brother receives a silly item in the mail anytime I do a road trip. This time I mailed him the tooth of some small mammal. It came out of a roadbed that ran through a 1950’s mining camp.

Happy Labor Day!

The next Blog installment might just be a day on the road. 

As always, check out my website: www.theghosttownhunter.com

Enjoy more photos on my Facebook: The Ghost Town Hunter

Follow me on twitter at #adventuresahead

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