August 26-September 2, 2007 - Leaving the North Cascades, we visited Coeur d'Alene
briefly and headed east towards Montana. In the town of Smelterville, 30 miles east of
Coeur d'Alene we stopped overnight at Walmart. We noticed a paved bike path next to
the parking lot and took out
our bikes to explore. We soon
discovered that we were in the
middle of the charming 72-
mile-long Trail of the Coeur
d'Alenes rails-to-trails bike
path. We found a campground
and stayed a week so we could explore the bike path more fully. Each
day we drove the truck to a trailhead, unloaded the bikes and rode a
ten mile segment, out and back.
The valley area 30 miles east of Coeur d'Alene is one of the richest
mineral deposits in the world, and the town of Kellogg is the heart of
this area. In the 1940's it was poisoned by the toxic silver mining
process. In the 1980's the mine closed, the railroad shut down and
everyone lost their jobs. As one woman put it, it looked like an
atom bomb had gone off. A fellow who grew up here in the 1940's
said you could taste the sulphur dioxide in your mouth all the time
and the air was always
hazy blue from the
smoke stacks and
smelters. Rather than
flee when their world
crashed in the 1980's,
many townspeople
stayed. Declared an
EPA superfund site,
Union Pacific cleaned
up their mess by
burying their toxic
waste along the tracks and creating
the 72-mile long paved bike path. The high school students planted a million trees
on the barren hills surrounding town in the 1980's, and today those hills are lush,
the air is clear, and the town is optimistic.
There is an
artsy flair to
the town.
Someone in
town loves St.
George and
the dragon:
we found them in a sculpture and a mural. Several homes
had an alpine look to them, and nearby there is a ski area
complete with gondola and chair lifts. There is something
upbeat and offbeat about Kellogg that really appealed to us.
The Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes is a gem. There are trailheads
along its lenth, each with display maps showing the highlights.
It passes through the historic town of Wallace, the simple
mobile home town of Osburn, the former mining towns of
Smelterville and Kellogg, and through the lakeside town of
Harrison. Some parts of the trail are busy and others are very
quiet. Mostly alone on the trail, there were times when we
shared it with cyclists, dog walkers, and inline skaters, but there
was never any congestion.
In one lonely area, far
from civilization, we
discovered some moose
tracks. I had been
reading a book that
talked about how moose
like to eat the roots of
lillies, and this part of the
Trail passed a large lilly
pond. Some workers
painting a train trestle
further down told us a
moose had been in the
area for several weeks.
After a week in this
charming part of the
world we ventured on
eastwards to northern
Montana and the
stunning Glacier National Park.