Scenes from the Road

Uncovering Idaho’s Best

Stanley, Idaho, 2 a.m.:
The rain that’s been pounding on the roof of the motorhome for the past five hours takes on a different sound. Instead of splat, splat, splat, it goes tink, tink, tink.

I peer out the window. Yep, it’s changing to hard, icy snow. And we are planning to go riding in, oh, five hours.

We have only two days available to sample what Idaho has to offer for road riders. I can’t help thinking that’s going to be difficult if we have to fit snow plows to the machines first.

I burrow farther into the sleeping bag and try to ignore it. Plenty of time to worry about the weather in the morning. Plenty of time…

Stanley, Idaho, 7 a.m.:
Beep, beep, beep, beep. It’s hard to locate my alarm in the feeble light of dawn. I finally punch the right button and silence descends—a silence like a morning after a fresh snowfall.

Uh-oh.

Gravel crunches under my feet as I head toward the home of former enduro star Mike McGowan, who’s been kind enough to let us use his parking area as our base of operations while we’re here.

Mike and Connie already have coffee made, and some of our crew are set up in front of the TV, watching the Weather Channel.

I can get all the meteorological information I need just by standing on the deck, overlooking the Salmon River. Here, at 6,200 feet, there’s a sloppy layer of slush. But looking west, over the small cluster of wooden buildings that comprises downtown Stanley, I discover that the first snow of the season has transformed the Sawtooth Mountains. What was a jagged wall of gray just yesterday has turned to ice castles, sparkling in the rising sun.

The view is magnificent, but the road we plan to take leads immediately to higher elevations. We’ll wait it out a bit.

Banner Summit, Noon:
The ride here wasn’t as bad as we had feared. Having lingered over breakfast, we finally dried off the machines, layered on plenty of clothing and headed out about a half-hour ago.

Turning right at the intersection—in Stanley you don’t have to ask which intersection—we picked up state Route 21, the Ponderosa Pine Scenic Byway, and started on one of the great motorcycle day-trips in the western U.S.

Snow still coats the grassy meadows on each side at 7,000 feet, but the road surface is drying rapidly, and it’s all downhill from here, following the Payette River into a long, rocky canyon.

Ernie Lombard, chairman of the Idaho Parks and Recreation Board and serious motorcycle enthusiast (see “Our Man on the Park Board,” page 28 in the February issue of American Motorcyclist), serves as our guide. We follow his Honda ST1100 on a two-lane sandwiched between rock walls and the river.

Running chase is Chuck Wells, Idaho’s state trails supervisor. He’s an animal on the dirt, but when it comes to asphalt, he claims to be a rank novice. When we showed him the Honda Interceptor he’d be riding, he scowled and muttered, “crotch rocket.” Already, though, we notice he’s starting to explore the Interceptor’s handling capabilities in the corners.

In between are the rest of us: Paul Slavik, press contact for American Honda, who brought up a truckload of toys for us to use. Lloyd Liebetrau, general manager of Fay Myers Motorcycle World in Denver, one of the West’s largest and most committed motorcycle shops, and his wife, Marilyn, serving as videographer for L&M Productions, which specializes in showing road and off-road motorcyclists the best places to go riding.

And then there’s Grant and myself, gawking at the scenery like a couple of hicks from back East who’ve never seen a mountain before.

As we continue west, the road gets gradually twistier, and the afternoon sun gets gradually warmer. Pretty soon, it’s turning into a perfect afternoon for a motorcycle ride.

Who’d have thought it, lying awake listening to snow pellets hit the roof of the motorhome at 2 a.m.?

Idaho Route 21 South of Lowman, Idaho, 2 p.m.:
Did I say perfect? There is no other word to describe Route 21 as it climbs toward Mores Creek Summit.

Picture endless curves, all flawlessly paved, all precisely arced, connected by just enough straight bits to let you glance at the pine-covered mountains. If you have a really good imagination, maybe, just maybe, you can conjure up something like this road.

Ours is a varied group, with two ST1100s, one VFR750, one VFR800, a VTX and a new 1800 Gold Wing. Yet we fall into a comfortable rhythm that allows everyone to have a good time.

I end up on the Gold Wing through this stretch, and it’s a revelation. The big bike just keeps cranking over in the corners while the world passes by through the giant windscreen. The only problem I have is exiting lefthanders, where there never seems to be enough room under the lever to make an upshift. This thing can lean.

At one point, Grant stops to take a photo at a pullout overlooking three ridges, all in a row, with the road arcing around the shoulder of each one. The rest of us head back and try to time it so there’s a bike on the apex of each turn, all at the same time. We ride the thing a dozen times and never manage to get it right, but nobody complains. Given any excuse, we’d ride it another dozen.

When we stop at one of the many overlooks, someone asks Chuck if they can take that crotch rocket off his hands. He tries to hide the smile on his face as he volunteers to put up with it just a little while longer.

Best of all, Route 21 has a cool destination, too. About 30 miles south of Lowman, you come to Idaho City, a gold-mining boom town that was established in 1862 and, within three years, had surpassed Portland, Oregon, to become the largest city in the Northwest.

Like most boom towns, Idaho City’s history was brief, but intense. By the time the miners had moved on to the next get-rich-quick strike, they had hauled more than $250 million worth of precious metals out of the ground in the Boise Basin. And they left behind a number of buildings you can still see today, like the Boise Basin Mercantile, the oldest store in the state, where “a pinch of gold” once bought you an apple.

Banner Summit, 8 p.m.:
This is what happens when you get a late start. It’s turning dark, and we’re still a half-hour out. Fortunately, the road is straighter at this end, but the surrounding woods are home to plenty of deer and elk.

Chuck, who knows the area well, takes the point, watching for signs of movement in his high beam. Over a late dinner back in Stanley, he sounds like the Interceptor could be getting to him. “How much do these things cost, anyway?” he asks.

Crawling back into the sleeping bag, I reset my alarm. Tomorrow, we’ve got a route planned that will take us all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the Craters of the Moon. We really need to get rolling on time.

Challis, Idaho, 9 a.m.:
Now this is more like it.

We woke up this morning to find an icy fog hovering about 10 feet above the ground. Hey, at least it’s not snow.

But the good news is that we’re now about 60 miles down the road and already cruising under bright sunshine.

Leaving Stanley, we turned east, heading down the Salmon River valley on winding Idaho Route 75. For us, it turned into a journey of contrasts, as we constantly went from frigid shadows behind the shoulders of mountains into blinding whiteouts of backlit fog.

Approaching the town of Challis, we pulled in at a new visitors center created by the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation to highlight the area’s wealth of mining history. Turns out it’s a great place to examine artifacts of that era while we warm up a bit.

We mount up again, and with the fog burning off, we head south, warmed by bright sunshine.

The map says we’re on U.S. Route 93, but a few miles out of town I swear we’ve taken a wrong turn. The road looks like it heads straight into the side of a mountain and disappears.

As we approach, we discover that road builders actually found a narrow crack in the rocks barely wide enough to lay down two lanes of asphalt. This shortcut through the mountains follows Grand View Canyon, which wanders this way and that for about a mile before spitting you out into a high valley on the other side.

Arco, Idaho, noon:
As you pull into Arco, it’s clear that this is a border town. Not because it sits on the boundary of two states, but because it’s wedged between so many different environments.

Coming from the north, we followed the valley of the Big Lost River past some of Idaho’s most impressive mountains, including Borah Peak, at 12,662 feet, the highest point in the state.

Right at Arco, though, the mountains run out, and we find ourselves on the edge of the high-desert expanse known as the Snake River Plain. In the distance are buttes that have us thinking Arizona rather than Idaho.

But there’s more. East of Arco is an enormous U.S. Department of Energy facility with a top-secret past. It was here that the reactor for the nation’s first nuclear-powered submarine was constructed. It’s also the site of EBR-1, the experimental breeder reactor used to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept back in the ’50s.

As we ride in, we note that Arco bills itself as the first city in the country to get its electricity from atomic power. We find the best way to celebrate this achievement—by stopping at Pickles Place and ordering a round of Atomic Burgers. The menu doesn’t say so, but it appears they’re made with real atoms.

The most unusual terrain, though, is located west of Arco, at Craters of the Moon National Monument. This spot truly lives up to its billing as “the strangest 75 square miles on the North American continent.”

In this region, not one, but dozens of low volcanic cones have spewed lava over the centuries, leaving behind a blackened landscape that, in many parts, is too rugged to even hike. The place has a post-apocalyptic feel to it, with gnarled trees and bushes rising out of tortured ground. It’s hard to imagine anything more different from the mountain meadows we were riding through just a couple of hours earlier.

Ketchum, Idaho, 3 p.m.:
Turning north on the final leg of our ride, we immediately leave the desert behind and climb back into the mountains.

But these aren’t just any mountains—they have long been the playground of the rich, who have gathered at nearby Sun Valley, the ski resort where the chair lift was invented in the ’30s.

Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway helped build the town’s reputation back then, while stars like Bruce Willis keep it alive today.

For motorcyclists, there are other important names connected with Ketchum. Two of the country’s premier goggle manufacturers—Scott and Smith—are based right here in town.

But frankly, what we notice most about Ketchum is the traffic.

We’ve been spoiled by two days of riding through Idaho’s empty back country.

Waiting three cycles of the lights to get through one intersection is more unbearable than usual.

Galena Summit, 5 p.m.:
It seems only fitting—a ride that began in snow is ending the same way.

Here, at 8,700 feet, we’ve climbed nearly to the snowline. The white stuff picks up where the pine trees leave off, masking the naked rock faces high up on the mountains. Warmed by the sun, though, the road is dry and clear, and the fast sweepers take our minds off the dropping temperatures.

After several miles of rising curves, we find a pullout and stop to savor the view. On the left is the Sawtooth Range; on the right, the White Clouds, glistening in the clear mountain air.

Ahead, it’s only about 30 miles back to the tiny town of Stanley. If we left right now, we could knock off the last leg of our trip in no time.

But then, why would we want to?