Lemhi Mountains

Idaho has some beautiful mountain ranges.  I would like to introduce you to the Lemhi Mountains.  They run north-south and are Idaho's longest mountain range not bisected by a road passable by a highway vehicle.  The Lemhis contain Idaho's second-highest peak, Diamond Peak.  When the Lewis and Clark Expedition crossed the continental divide they were greeted by a view of range upon range of rugged, snow-capped mountains.  The Lemhis were in the foreground.

Sacagawea called the Lemhi Mountains home, and she literally danced for joy when she saw these familiar peaks.  When this area is added to the National Wilderness Protection System, as well it should be, it is my hope that this be designated as the Sacagawea Wilderness to honor one of our nation's most famous women.

Many of the peaks in the Lemhis are over 10,000 feet in height, some remain unnamed.  This is the view from Lem Peak, looking south at sunrise.

The evening before, the sun had set in the west long before I reached my high-elevation campsite.

On the way back down, I descended from the stark realm above treeline to the realm of springs and seeps where vegetation gains a foothold on this rocky planet.  Mountains always remind me of the fragility of life, and that the zone where life can get a foothold and thrive is not exhaustive.

At the southern end of the range wildflowers bloom, like this penstemon.

It was here that I saw my first Lark Sparrow.  This sparrow is elegant and unmistakable with a single spot in the center of a clean breast, and a bold chestnut facial pattern.

The Lemhis contain Idaho's only natural arch.

There is a narrow slit canyon as well.

While involved with the conservation effort for this beautiful landscape I had the opportunity to speak with some of the local residents.  One rancher said to me, "We just want it to stay like it is."  Though the opinion expressed was intended to convey opposition to Wilderness designation, it struck me that Wilderness designation is the best way to assure this national treasure remains "like it is" for future generations.

Early one morning, at dawn, the airplane I was in climbed toward 32,000 feet and passed just south of the Lemhi Mountains.  Here they are, in all their glory, with the Continental Divide to the east.  This is fault-block mountain building, plate tectonics at work.

Wilderness designation for the Lemhi Mountain Range of Idaho is my primary unfinished lifetime goal.  The opposition to Wilderness designation is largely philosophical, based on principle, not fact.  There are no proven mineral reserves.  There is very limited grazing in these high, brushy peaks.  The thin line of slow-growing trees represent some of the poorest, least-productive forests in Idaho.  If you were seeing this view at night, there would not be lights of civilization below.  This is some of the best wildlife habitat remaining in Idaho.  Herds of pronghorn travel the valleys and salmon spawn in the rivers.

This is about as wild, rugged, and majestic an American landscape as exists in the lower 48 states.  It is protected only by remoteness, but as civilization encroaches on the last frontiers it is threatened by unrestrained off-road motor vehicle use.  I do not deny that this is a beautiful place to ride a dirt bike or ATV.  But, I have seen the lasting damage to soils and vegetation caused by the irresponsible behavior of uncaring thrill-seekers.  The Forest Service has worked to rehabilitate some of the damage I brought to their attention, calling the situation "appalling."  Suffice it to say that there is a "sport" in Idaho that consists of driving a 4-wheel drive vehicle through wet meadows (called "mudding") and up steep hillsides (called "hillclimbs").  The destruction to the landscape is indeed appalling.  These mountains deserve better.

Yellowstone National Park Geothermal Features

I have had the good fortune to visit Yellowstone National Park on more than one occasion.  I had a roommate who made an annual pilgrimage to the Park on the final weekend it was open, before the winter closure takes effect.  The crisp autumn air accentuates the steaming geothermal features.  Elk bugle and lock horns in their dominance displays.  It is not so crowded at the end of the season.

In addition to geysers, there are mud pots that bubble and roil like a pot of boiling water.  Every so often a big wad of mud is hurled into the air and I dubbed those "mud frogs."

By first light, every small fumarole stands tall and magnificent.

These stark tree trunks are the remains of trees killed as the hotspot evolves and moves.  Geothermal systems are not static, and when there is an earthquake some geothermal features disappear and new ones appear at the ground surface.  The sentinels stand with their roots in hot mineral water and the trunk act as a wick, drawing the minerals into the wood.  If you ever wondered about the origins of petrified wood, you're seeing it being created here.

Central City, Colorado

I worked during two summers, my junior and senior year of college, in Central City, Colorado.  I was head usher at the Central City Opera House, the second-oldest opera house in the United States.  After the season ended I remained on to serve as a tour guide in the Teller House Hotel, known in its day as the finest accommodations between St. Louis and San Franciso.  President U.S. Grant stayed there.  OK, so he slept off the results of a drinking binge.  He certainly did lie down on a bed for a while.

The City of Central is home to the "Richest Square Mile on Earth."  By which it is meant that more precious metal was extracted from that square mile than anywhere else.  It was rich in gold and silver, and was even the source of the yellowcake Madame Curie used to do her experiments on radioactivity.

The entire town is a National Historic District.

Jack Kerouac visited and wrote about his experience in On the Road.  Bob Dylan performed there, and was booed off the stage.  Gambling was legal, then it was not, and now it is once again.  It's like going to Disneyland with bars.  Lots of bars.  I was too young to drink, so the bars did not impress me one way or another.

At 8,500 feet elevation, and a short walk to a stunning view of the Continental Divide, this was an idyllic place to work for the summer.  The photo below is the view from Longs Peak.  Longs Peak is the most-climbed of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks, and I did climb it with my friends.

I climbed James Peak a couple of times.  James Peak is over 13,000 feet in elevation and the tiny alpine wildflowers, like this Alpine Spring Beauty reward the effort.

Claytonia megarhiza

Wildflowers

Here are some wildflowers I have seen and photographed.  When I went to college, I believed I wanted to be an interpretive naturalist working in the National Park system.  It seemed a very fun thing to do, based on my experience as the recipient of the guided walks given by naturalists.  I even worked in Acadia National Park one summer, employed by the Department of Interior, National Park Service.  It was a lot of fun.

When I attended college I studied Plant Ecology, Plant Natural History, Coastal Plant Ecology (a graduate level course with Dr. Paul S. Godfrey), and Ecology (with Dr. Lincoln P. Brower, the Monarch Butterfly researcher).  I was also interested in photography, and photographed wildflowers as I chanced upon them.  Because of the science interest, I tried to identify the Latin names of the plants I photographed.  Feel free to correct me if any of these are not accurate.

Arisaema triphyllum

Jack in the Pulpit

In the Massachusetts woods

Cornus canadensis

Dogwood

On the coast of Maine

Beach Pea
On the coast of Maine

North Carolina

Nebraska

Dodecatheon

Shooting Star

Idaho

Gilia aggregata

Scarlet Gilia

Allium acuminatum

Wild Onion

Sunflower

Round-lobed Hepatica

Massachusetts woods

Polygala paucifolia

Gaywings

Polygala paucifolia

Gaywings

Uvularia perfoliata

Perfoliate Bellwort
Massachusetts woods

Houstonia caerulea

Bluets

This is one reason I did not want to mow the lawn in Maine.

Hieracium aurantiacum

Orange Hawkweed

Maine

Mimulus nanus

Dwarf Lewis' Monkeyflower

Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho

Cypripedium calceolus

Yellow Lady Slipper

Canada

Trillium ovatum

Trillium

Olympic National Park, Washington

Trillium erectum

Trillium
Massachusetts woods

Calypso bulbosa

Calypso Orchid
Olympic National Park, Washington

Calypso bulbosa

Calypso Orchid
Olympic National Park, Washington

Winter on Bald Mountain

I spent a couple of decades of my life taking an early retirement as a ski bum in Idaho's Wood River Valley.  As a youngster I grew up in Maine.  Going out the door of my house I could go across the road, through the baseball field and cemetery and down the hill to the estuary.  Or I could go up the road or down the road.  Behind me lay the woods, which seemed endless, but in fact were really just swampy and not conducive to hiking.  Down the road, toward the main highway (US Route 1) was an old vacant house, overgrown with tall grass.  One day, after years of vacancy, a retired couple appeared and they could be seen moving in.  The fellow got a lawn mower and worked to restore order to the overgrown yard.  It took a lot of mowing.  Then an ambulance pulled up, and took him away.  Heart attack.  My mother became friends with his widow.

This was my life lesson about the thing called "retirement."  Retirement was a chancy thing.  There are no guarantees except for those who create their own destiny.  Some would say I invented "slacker" before the Me Generation became aware of it.  I prefer to think that I invented the hedge fund.  I placed my bets that I would have a retirement by taking it from age 18 to 36.  The odds were good, and I won.

For the record, I paid my own way.  When I say "slacker," I'm not talking about "freeloader," kids.  I paid for my own college.  All of it.  Yes, parents and relatives extended me credit, and I have always repaid my debts.  I rather loathe debt, actually.  I was brought up not to be beholden.  Nobody likes indentured servitude, even if it is an American institution.  I had seasonal work, when it snowed, on Sun Valley's Bald Mountain.  I had self-employment, as a photographer.  When I got serious, at age 36, I went into part-time employment.

For the record, I'm now in wage-earner mode.  A minimum of 40 hours per week, sometimes with overtime that once hit 70 hours in a week.  I plan my vacations a year in advance.  It is the kind of thing the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper tries to encourage.  The tax collectors love it, too.  I'm helping to fund a global superpower.  I buy U.S. Savings Bonds.

Let's talk about the good old days, instead.

I lived and worked in Ketchum, Idaho, at the base of Baldy.  As my buddy Murray and I searched for housing, one fellow asked, "Coming up to the mountains for the winter?"

"No," I replied, "coming down from 8,500 feet."  That's another story, for another day.  If you think Idaho has mountains, check out Colorado.  I was an aspiring artist, and the above image of Baldy exposed by moonlight with a 4" x 5" camera was printed as a photo aquatint, also known more commonly as a gum bichromate.  It is a permanent photographic process invented in 1858 in which watercolor pigments (not dyes) are bonded to archival paper and was the first instance of color photography.

Did I mention that my winter job came with a free season pass to Bald Mountain?  I was a pinhead.  I'm talking about telemark skiing.  Free the heel and the mind will follow.

Here's Kelly, skiing uphill in the backcountry.  Before I got the job at the ski mountain, that was how one earned the fun of skiing down ... by attaching skins to the bottom of the skis and trudging up for hours, then skiing down in minutes (or falling downhill over and over, depending on the very variable snow conditions).

There was a lot of beauty to be enjoyed in the winter, and by staying active I stayed warm.  But, those who have experienced Idaho know that the seasons just keep getting better and better.  The warming of spring and brief greening of the desert, then the summer when one retreats from the heat to the melting snowfields and alpine meadows, and, as the Earnest Hemingway monument states, "Best of all, he loved the fall."

We'll look at those other seasons later.  For now, here's another photo taken from nearly the same vantage point as that gum bichromate I talked about earlier.  This time we're again using the 4" x 5" camera to create a multiple time-exposure of the fireworks over Sun Valley, Idaho along with the torchlight parade ending at the bottom of Dollar Mountain during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of America's premier ski resort, the location where the ski lift was invented and first installed.  The Sun Valley lodge is over there on the left.

Transcontinental Bicycle Trip

As I get older, the milestones I have accomplished in the past grow in importance, perhaps due to the realization that these events will stand as my "personal best."  I'm coming to grips with the fact that, although I have climbed Idaho's third highest peak, it becomes less and less likely that I will reach the summit of the second highest or premier mountain.  So, rather than just being frustrated by limitations, I revel in memories of what I have done and try not to dwell upon that which I have not yet accomplished.

I don't think I'll ever travel farther under my own power than I did on this transcontinental bicycle trip.  I began in Maine, at the rocky coast of the Atlantic Ocean and headed southwest through New England, crossing Lake Champlain, then entering Canada and proceeding west through mosquito infested territory north of the Great Lakes, dropping south into the United States at Sault Saint Marie. I was sorely (really sorely) tempted to quit when I reached my friend Mike's house in Wisconsin.  It would have been easy to take the bus home.  But after a rest, I forged onward across the great plains.

I had many adventures and saw America.  I heard the morning drumming of grouse (and was even attacked by one that darted from the underbrush and charged my feet as I pedaled through upstate New York).  I enjoyed seeing Devil's Tower and reveled in the cool pine-scented air of the Black Hills.  The sun in the Badlands heated the temperature to over 100 degrees, and I drank a lot of water and wore white.  I watched the Bighorn Mountains loom larger as I approached across the endless flat plains, then mounted them to sleep astride their heights in a meadow of alpine wildflowers at the base of a snowbank.  Down to the plains, then back up into Yellowstone National Park, to sleep with the grizzly bears.  By then I was pretty much coated with grease, so maybe I smelled so bad they left me alone.  In Idaho I quit.

If you're contemplating a transcontinental bicycle tour, don't go past your own home.  The temptation to stop is great, and I did.  I wrote up the adventure I had experienced and submitted it to Bicycling Magazine along with some photos.  I called the story, 'From Sea to Shining Idaho.'  They didn't buy it.  But they did offer me a contract to complete the trip and then they would buy it.  I got back on the bike.  I want to thank my sponsor, The Elephant's Perch sporting goods store in Ketchum, Idaho.  On the first leg of my trip I had hauled a lot of stuff, including a rather heavy tent.  Though it was good for keeping the mosquitoes out of my dreams, it was a lot to haul thousands of miles over mountain ranges.  The Elephant's Perch provided me with a very nice Gore-tex bivy sack.  I did without the tent for the last 850 miles or so.

The trip from Idaho to the Pacific followed a route rich in natural and human history.  There just are not many ways to get there from here, so I had to closely follow the Lewis and Clark route.  As I pedaled along on pavement I thought often of them walking an unmarked route through an unfamiliar land.  Any claim I might have to a "difficult journey" evaporated as I marveled at their determination and stamina.  Never forget, once at their destination their next task was to turn around and walk back.

I was also following the route of the migrating salmon that are flushed to the sea by the melting snows of spring in Idaho's central mountains.  Those Sockeye Salmon, too, have a return journey ahead of them.  They must swim from the ocean, upstream, overcoming dam after dam until they return to Redfish Lake where they originated ... then spawn and die.  One year only a single Sockeye made it back.  No spawning.  Just death.  I think we should celebrate this heroic effort, this fish that traveled farther upstream, to a higher elevation, than any other fish on the planet.  We give our Olympic athletes medals for less.  But one of Idaho's elected representatives stated that as long as she could buy salmon in a can at the grocery store she could care less about Idaho's Sockeye Salmon.  They hover on the brink of extinction, their fate completely in the hands of people like that representative.

It is hard to avoid pondering these things as one moves through the landscape day after day, week after week, and month after month using muscle power, the wheel, and gravity to move ever westward chasing the setting sun.

Here is where I started, in Maine, in Acadia National Park, at the Atlantic Ocean.

Below you'll see me about to head into the mountains that divide Idaho from Montana, following at this moment the same route used by the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  I'm quite close to the birthplace of Sacajawea, and traveling in the opposite direction but along the same route followed by Chief Joseph during his long fighting retreat away from the United States Cavalry and many armed volunteers.

Yeah, it is a Schwinn Continental.

At the mouth of the Columbia River, near Seaside, Oregon.  Yes, I traveled most of this journey alone, riding one day in Idaho with my friend Anne.  I encountered a great deal of kindness and generosity on this ride.  I was often asked, "How far are you going?"

I took to answering, "All the way."

Another common question was what cause I was doing this for.  As a kid, I once rode in a Bike-a-thon for the American Cancer Society, and I guess some who make this journey do it for a cause.  I did it because I could, and because it was there.  The adventure taught me a life lesson about perseverance and patience that has never dimmed over the years.