Stories, images and videos of small adventure trips in and around the state of Idaho
Finally. I’ve been telling Kayla’s Polish boyfriend Nick that we’d ride for more than a year now. This may be his last summer in America for a while so it had to happen. We did the quick, sort of standard loop along the backside of the Boise Ridge, Humpty and Daggett. It was a nice workout.
For my first winter retreat with Gaia GPS, we ski and snowshoe on record Sierra Nevada snowpack to spend two nights in a hut at 8,000 feet. It’s bound to be good team building.
My neighbor and I take advantage of the year’s waning sun to find high desert adventure across the Snake River in the once heavily mined hills around Silver City.
An oft expressed intention was finally made real as my neighbor and I got out for a ride together. For a solid five hours, I saw the world without made-up political memes. At first my eyes stung but slowly they adjusted to the lack of hyperbole.
I borrow Kayla’s Brazil backpack — cerulean with a yellow silk flower — so I can join a co-worker for a short hike and camp trip somewhere around Stanley.
The final mild days of autumn and a new co-worker from Twin Falls, also a photo enthusiast, are occasion to walk the riparian ravine — a green stripe among beige hills — in Boise’s nearby Military Reserve.
Boulder Basin came to mind when the need for a getaway arose. It’s about as far removed from civilization as you can get in an automobile around here, enough of a trip that you’d best plan on spending the night.
Michael and I take advantage of unseasonably warm February weather to explore roads and histories south of the Snake River. [ Addendum: I’ve added images at the end showing some motorized restrictions we overlooked during the ride. Plan accordingly. ]
Michael and I ride from Boise through Prairie and across the mountains to Pine and Featherville before turning north to camp around a high mountain lake. We cover highway, gravel, dirt roads, ATV and singletrack, a real dual sport adventure.
Michael and I ride from Succor Creek Road through the Oregon Owyhees in an eighty mile loop around Three Fingers Butte.
Michael and I make a loop between Idaho City, Rocky Bar and Atlanta, Idaho, down forest roads, through a bit of snow, and finally ridge-top single track. It was a good thing he brought a saw or we might have missed “whoopty hell.”
I am led by some guy I haven’t met before, Michael, down hours of mountain single track around Deadwood Reservoir. We start up to Bogus, through Placerville and Crouch before hitting narrow mountain trails I’d never ridden before — adventure as usual.
Weather had been unusually nice and my friend Greg Bunce had some business in Boise so, at his prompting, we decided to make it a weekend motorcycle trip from our homes in Moscow, Idaho. I would hang out with my childhood friend Brett, who’d moved there a few years earlier, while Greg was busy. At the time, I worked at the University of Idaho computer store and so had access to demonstration units of some of the first-ever consumer digital cameras, such as the Apple QuickTake and Casio QV-10. I used them quite a bit — so cool to see the photos right on our computer monitors! What we didn’t see comparing our fourteen-inch screens to 4 × 6 prints was just how much quality was lost compared to film. It’s almost tragic but I guess also a bit of history. These were probably shot on the QV-10. Its images were less than one-tenth of a megapixel (320 × 240).
Although several years and many rides preceded this one, I think this is the oldest (the exact date is an educated guess) of which I have pictures, a quest for high school senior photos in the mountains above Clarkia, Idaho.