The Golden Spike for the Bitterroot Trail

 





The missing Missoula-to-Lolo segment of the 50-mile Missoula-to-Hamilton Bitterroot Trail opened yesterday.  








 

 
While the path runs disconcertingly close to zooming cars on highway 93, and the noise of those cars drowns out cyclists' conversation, at least bikes now have some of their own space on this dangerous stretch.  

















And the valley is worth experiencing at 10 miles per hour.  










We joined hundreds of riders grinning their way from Silver Park in Missoula to Travelers' Rest State Park for a ribbon cutting ceremony.  I have never seen so many bikes in one place.

Some of the speakers were those who worked hard for decades to make this trail possible, and

Tony Incashola blessed the old place and new trail in Salish and commemorated the day as the anniversary of the unfortunate 1855 Hellgate Treaty that led to the 1859 removal of the Salish from their home in the Bitterroot Valley. 

 

A charming part of the celebration was the chorus from Toronto in town for the International Choral Festival that not only sang before the speeches but also stood at the balloon gate and sang the riders north afterward.  

Heading north, the first riders, with cardboard horse heads on their bikes, represented Corps of Discovery members who camped at Travelers' Rest in 1805 and 1806.  Right behind them rode bikers from the 1976 Transcontinental Bikecentennial, gathered for a 40th anniversary reunion.  







We followed, cheered by some very fresh pavement and the community of bike shorts, fraternité, egalité, liberté, and joie de vivre.

Ketchum, Idaho

Approaching Ketchum from the South

We toodled around on our bikes on the Wood River Trail System over two beautiful days this week; the paved paths connect Bellevue (elevation 5200') and Ketchum (elevation 6000') with a 15-mile, north-south, rail-to-trail run paralleling highway 75.  They also go two miles farther up the Wood River beyond Ketchum and branch east and west from Ketchum: west beside Warm Springs Road, east on the 6-mile Elkhorn/Sun Valley loop, and a ways farther east past Sun Valley beside Trail Creek Road. 

Ritzau Park, between Hailey and Ketchum

The Wood River stretch has plentiful benches and some water fountains, restrooms, shady sections, and river access points.

Between the Golf Course and Elkhorn Road

The Elkhorn/Sun Valley Loop winds through neighborhoods and golf courses. 

The beautiful Hemingway Memorial is just off the Trail Creek Road path.   Above the East Fork valley, its column stands with a sculpted head of Hemingway and a plaque with words excerpted and edited from a eulogy he gave in 1939 for a friend in Ketchum:

 


"Best of all he loved the fall 
the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
leaves floating on the trout streams
and above the hills
     the high blue windless skies.
Now he will be a part of them forever."
     Ernest Hemingway --  Idaho -- 1939

 

Behold!

At Galena Summit (9000') on the way home, we  stopped for a short hike on the Titus Lake trail--quintessentially Sawtoothy with its balsamroot, paintbrush, forget-me-nots, little creeks to hop over, and snow patches to cross.

Chronos and Kairos

Blue sky, warm air, and a ride into town.  As with some years' early weeks of winter when cold and snow feel novel and wonderful, this summer's slow arrival makes a day like today especially bright--no smoke yet, the grass still green, the warmth just warmth and not scorch.  As my bike bottle reminds me in words around the top: never a bad day to bike.  This is really not, not, not a bad day to bike.  We head out to visit some sculptures we like.   

 












The Magnificent Tree of the Arts, by Tom Rippon, 1996, on the east wall of the Performing Arts, Radio, and TV Building at UM, is made of about a thousand pieces of porcelain, many representing paintbrushes, trumpets, and glissando symbols, or maybe those wavelets are wavy brush strokes.   
 
Flight Column, by Robert J. Gehrke, 1996, made of Cor-Ten Steel, 24' x 3' x 1 3/4" stands on the sidewalk near the business building and across from the music building on the UM campus.  The column is almost invisible on edge, but even looking at it straight on is looking through it; the figures of birds are made of sky.  And they are particular, recognizable kinds of birds: bald eagles, 3 kinds of swallows, hawks and nighthawks, crows, peregrine falcons, pigeons, meadowlarks, and a kingfisher.  

Perseverance and Passage, by George Ybarra, 2015, also made of Cor-Ten steel, leans and trudges forward in Silver Park, near the Clark Fork River and bike path.  It commemorates the steadfast people who have lived here over time, the travelers who have made their way along the river, and the industrial mill workers who made their living on this site that has been reclaimed as a park.

James Parker was reviewing a poetry book and describing what poetry does in the May 2016 Atlantic, but he could have been writing about experiencing music, birds, sky, or Cor-Ten steel when he contrasted ordinary days with extraordinary moments: "Existence heaps itself upon you; your tongue thickens and your thoughts get cluttered.  But you keep a muddy eye trained on the world's poetry portals, the places where the poems come flapping through, because you know that a line, a rhyme, a verb can reboot your internal chitchat and zap you out of all your encrustations.  You know that this is the poet's job, in the end: to remind you--oh, the cheesiness, but oh, the urgency--how to be alive."

 

Super North Peak Superbloom

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
       Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 258-263



The balsamroot golden lads have come to dust, but their leaves shelter Indian paintbrush on the North Peak.

Clouds, flowers, grass flew around in the wind, 

but it was a good day for soft light in sheltered spots!

shaggy fleabane, Erigeron pumilus

blanketflower, Gaillardia aristata

bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva

threadleaf phacelia, Phacelia linearis

lupine and yarrow

larkspur

golden aster, Chrysopsis villosa

Super Jumbo Superbloom

Cushion Buckwheat, Eriogonum ovalifolium

Lupine, Lupinus

Death Camas, Zigadenus venenosus, and Prairie Smoke, Geum triflorum

Death Camas

Prairie Smoke

Summit garden, Sin Min Koos (Salish), Mt. Jumbo

Bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva

Fuzzytongue Penstemon, Penstemon eriantherus

Prairie Smoke

Looking into New Corners in a Long-Loved Place

             "This is the most beautiful place on earth.

          There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome--there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment….  For myself, I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it--the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky….”  Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire

We’d never been to Dead Horse State Park or Island in the Sky in Canyonlands, and we hadn’t hiked in Arches since the 1990s.  It was time to go back to Abbey Country, and, with Sylvie, the Prius Utility Vehicle, we could bring our bikes and a whole lot more.

Staying in one of the three yurts--huge wood-frame tents--at Dead Horse Point State Park requires planning (we reserved in January for May), but they make an excellent home base for hiking and biking in the state park and at Island in the Sky. 

 The three yurts share outdoor water spigots and restrooms, and each has heat and air conditioning, a ceiling fan, double-mattress-sized bunk bed, a futon, and a table and chairs.

Looking East toward...

...the La Sal Mountains

Their decks have gas grills, tables, lounge chairs, big skies, and views of the La Sal Mountains and out into canyon country.  

At the Buck Canyon Overlook

Wonderful to have bikes with us!  We met someone riding an early-80s-vintage, lovable Bridgestone bike like mine making the long ride from Moab to Island in the Sky’s Grandview Point (70 miles round trip), but we drove from the yurt to the Mesa Arch trail head and biked from there to Grandview Point—12 miles round trip with a wide margin in the day for moseying.  Out in Canyonlands, we walked to Mesa Arch and to Grandview Point.  Back in the state park, we walked along the mesa edge.

Biking Back toward Mesa Arch

Mesa Arch

The White Rim from the Grandview Point Trail

Looking toward the La Sal Mountains from Dead Horse Point

Our home base for wandering around town, hiking in Arches, and biking the Potash Road was the greenest motel we have ever seen, with not only the usual compostable coffee cups and prominent recycling bins but also more than 280 photo-voltaic panels (we tried to count).   
And, endearingly, their wind vane has a bike on it.

Near the End of the Potash Road Pavement

Colorado River and Potash Road

Jug Handle Arch

For biking the Potash Road (Utah highway 279), we drove to the end of the pavement at the Intrepid Potash Mine and then rode back upriver until we were ready to turn around, taking our time in the neighborhood of Jug Handle Arch, the Colorado River, and lots of red rock.

Pine Tree Arch

At Arches, we watched storms circle and blow through the park, learned some sandstone/siltstone geology from a ranger, remembered Ed, and walked between the sandstone fins and arch-itecture.

Landscape Arch

Between the Fins

Snow

Pattee Canyon

We have had a remarkable early winter with frequent snow, cold temperatures to keep it, and beautiful bright-dark skies.  NOAA has forecast a dry, warm winter for us, so we expect that will arrive, but for now we have skiing near town and walking in the neighborhood on clean, creaky, dry snow. 

Rattlesnake Valley Out the Window