The Beat Goes On

After Glacier, Craig had to get home but I still had a couple more weeks of vacation left. We had to drive to Boise, Idaho and Craig flew home from there. On the way to Boise, we decided to stop and see the Hell’s Canyon area. It was still fairly early in the season though, and we found that the road we were trying to take up into the area was closed by snow past a certain point. We parked along the side of the road and hiked up (a couple of miles) and walked around for a while.

While we were up there, because we were old motorcycle riders, Craig asked me if I could hear a 2-stroke bike off in the distance. I told him that I could and, as we listened, the sound got louder and closer. A few minutes later a guy came over the top of the snow bank blocking the road on a little yellow dirt bike. Nearly sliding out and doing a face-plant as he did so. He saw us and stopped and we talked for a while. Nice guy. He said he had to go back down, but, if we were headed for McCall keep an eye out for him. Look for the bike in the back of a white mini-pickup truck. He took off.

Later, as we hiked back down, there were some interesting marks in the snow that we speculated was our friend crashing.

When we got back to the truck, there was a note stuck on the windshield from our friend. He asked if we saw his “crash & burn” marks coming down and said he hoped he’d see us later.

We drove down and went into McCall. Nice little resort-type town. Good size lake. Lots of boaters. Also one of the entry points to get back into the Sawtooth Wilderness. As we drove through town we saw a battered white mini-truck with a yellow dirt bike in it parked at a restaurant/pub (The Brass Frog if I remember correctly). We laughed, made an abrupt turn, and parked. We found our friend inside and we all had a good dinner and talked about travel, motorcycles, forest rangers (he was studying to be one), and Idaho (he was from Pocatello), A very pleasant evening. He gave us some good tips on other things to see in Idaho.

The next day, we were going to take my 4-wheel drive truck and go back over a few logging roads back into the Sawtooth wilderness. That plan didn’t last long. Even with all of our preparation, the logging road had so much debris from the trucks on it that, only about five miles down the road, we punctured a tire on some ghastly looking shard of metal. We changed it and limped back to McCall where we had the tire repaired and called it a day.