Missoula, MT to Mackay, ID – 250 Miles
Interstate Highways are an excellent and efficient way of getting from Point A to Point B in the quickest possible manner, short of jumping on an airplane and flying. Mandated by the Eisenhower administration back in the 1950’s, they comprise one of the world’s great ground transportation systems. One must remember, however, that these were conceived in the height of the Cold War, and the purpose of these broad, minimum four-lanes wide highways was not only for the efficient movement of civilian commerce but for rapidly transporting military goods from one part of the country to another. In fact, I read somewhere that the design specifications for the Interstate Highways originally required at least one mile of straight, level pavement for every X number of overall miles of roadway; the purpose for which was to provide emergency runways for military aircraft. But somewhere along the way between then and now, as the tentacles of the Interstate Highway stretched from coast to coast and border to border, the character of America was bypassed, just as these speedy, limited access autobahns bypassed the hundreds of small towns that made our country unique. No other nation this large, while sharing a common language and system of government, retained the infinite variety of subcultures that each small town and village represented as one drove across the country on the old Route 66, for example. Because of the Interstate Highways, some of this uniqueness has been lost. Now we have an endless stretch of parallel ribbons of asphalt, punctuated by the same fast food restaurants, the same gasoline chains, the same Walmarts – even the same signage from one end of the country to another. We drive four, five, or maybe even six hundred miles a day at 75 miles per hour, barely noticing the scenery around us. The movie Cars did a better job of illustrating this sad fact than I could ever hope to describe.
So what’s the point of this philosophical tirade? Only to explain why we, in our travels, try to avoid the Interstates and stick to the “blue highways,” as William Least Heat Moon called them in his excellent book by that name back in the 1960s. And this is why we came to choose US 93 rather than Interstate 90 as we left Missoula this morning. It wasn’t exactly by chance that we chose this route; we had planned to come this way two years ago after our Pacific Northwest jaunt, but by the time we reached Missoula that year we were anxious to get home and gave in to the speed and efficiency of the Interstate. (There was actually a bit of serendipity that resulted from that choice as well, but that’s a story for another time.) But this time we were determined to take the back road – maybe we’re just trying to prolong the special experience of this journey and delay our return to the humdrum routine of life back in the big city as long as possible.
At any rate, we pulled out onto US 93 as we headed south from Missoula. On the map, Highway 93 is lined with those little green dots that signify a “scenic route,” and believe me, it turned out to be. Maybe not as scenic as some of the wonderful highways we’ve experienced along the way on this journey, but nevertheless stunning in the variety of terrain we passed through in the 250 miles of today’s drive. The first 30 or 40 miles is a wide, four-lane road that passes through several small towns – suburbs of Missoula I guess you could call them. Except for one stretch of major construction that lasted for at least 15, maybe 20 miles, it was a pleasant drive as the highway followed the Bitterroot River up through the mountains that share the same name. The air was brown and hazy from the forest fires that are burning off to the west and southwest. At one point we could even smell the unmistakable odor of wood smoke in the air. The construction zone was worse than the worst highways we encountered throughout Alaska and Canada – bumpy, muddy gravel surfacing with several stops for flaggers at one-lane segments. But like everything else, it eventually came to an end.
Shortly thereafter, the road narrowed down to two lanes and began a steep, curving ascent through the Bitterroot National Forest up to Lost Trail Pass, elevation 6995 feet, at the Montana-Idaho border. A small ski resort is located right at this pass on the west side of the road. Then, just as steeply but not quite as curvy, the road descends down toward the town of Salmon, Idaho, and follows the Salmon River slowly upstream though a beautiful valley dotted here and there with classic western ranches. At the town of Challis, the highway leaves the Salmon River and begins a long, slow ascent through what I’d call high mountain desert – brown grass and sagebrush covering a rolling valley between two fingers of mountains. The climb was barely noticeable, but as I watched the GPS the altimeter slowly rolled upward from 3500 feet to 4500, 5500, 6500 feet, finally topping out at the Willow Creek Summit, elevation 7160 feet. From there it starts descending again, perhaps a little steeper than the ascent, but not much. The character of the terrain and vegetation is very similar to Middle Park, Colorado, up above Kremmling. This time, the road descends into the Big Lost River drainage. On the east side of the highway are the mountains of the Lost River Range, home to seven of Idaho’s ten tallest peaks. The tallest, Borah Peak, tops out at 12,662 feet, and is only one of a chain of several 12K peaks in the long chain that parallels the road. Twelve thousand feet may not seem to be exceptionally high to those of us from a state with 54 fouteeners, but these peaks rise rapidly from a valley floor more than six thousand feet below. No, they don’t have the massive, sheer vertical faces we saw along the Icefield Parkway in Canada or the peaks in Glacier National Park, but they are steep – definitely not walk-ups like many of the Colorado 14-ers where the actual climb is barely two or three thousand feet.
On the southern shoulder of this range we found our stopping point for the night, the Joe T. Fellini Campground, a BLM facility on the shores of Mackay Reservoir just west of the town of Mackay, Idaho. This campground looks for all the world like the campground at Woolford Mountain Reservoir just outside Kremmling, Colorado, a site which has some significance in the journey we’ve been on for the past 54 days. More on that later.
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