- October 15, 2017
- 28 photos


Apparently making up for lost time now, my neighbor Tony sends out word of another autumn ride, this time to the south. I RSVP in the positive once I’ve secured permission from the boss.
Apparently making up for lost time now, my neighbor Tony sends out word of another autumn ride, this time to the south. I RSVP in the positive once I’ve secured permission from the boss.
Our motorcycles maybe thought we’d retired but no, the hiatus is over. My neighbor Tony and I pull out the bikes to spend a day riding narrow trails through evergreen Idaho mountains.
Somehow it’s me and four ladies camping high in the Idaho mountains, two of them for the first time.
On the third and fourth days of our annual Brother Ride, we leave the beautiful campsite along the shore of high mountain Big Trinity Lake with plans to descend to historic Atlanta, Idaho, then venture on trails unknown to camp along the North Fork of the Boise River before returning home.
On the second day of our tenth annual ride, my brothers and I descend from Lava Mountain for gas before heading deeper into the mountains. At least that’s the plan. Mountains have a way of messing with plans.
The four of us — my brothers minus Jesse, Kayla’s boyfriend Nick and I — ride northeast from Boise to rise above the desert in search of solitude along narrow mountain paths.
Against prevailing wisdom, we set a course for a ridge high above Stanley to sleep then sit in observation of the celestial mating.
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.
Four guys in a Jeep drove up a hill and nothing got broke.
Wherein we finally demonstrate for Alexis that Boise is French and that not all of my shortcuts are … oh, wait, nevermind.
School has only been out a day and already “I’m bored” complaints are buzzing around the house like flies. Happily, we’re close to the river and foothills so we can always hop on our bikes or set out on foot from home for a bit of perspective.
More trips with Europeans: Nick from Poland joins us for an exciting adventure to one of Idaho’s frontier towns.
We head to the hills just outside of town for a little walk through murder, political intrigue and free gold along Five Mile Creek.
It is just Brenna and I this weekend which means … there will be camping.
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.
We head out from home on foot to survey flooding that, like our winter snow, is the highest in many years.
The year’s first stretch of sunshine invites us to spend a day exploring terrain popular a century ago and millennia ago in an unassuming desert canyon.