By John Rezell
High noon in Idaho’s West Mountains the baking summer sun sends the temperature soaring to triple digits as I settle into a steady rhythm climbing a nearly deserted gravel road outside of secluded Cabin Creek Campground with sweat pouring down my face.
The hillsides sport a wild mix of just about every type of vegetation, from towering Pines and Firs to creekside Aspen, scraggly Juniper to Sage and Wild Grass. None of it provides even a pinch of shade on the road with the sun at its zenith.
If you think that exotic jumble of flora would be as inspiring to the eyes as, say, a deep green forest or soft tan desert vista, well, you’d be wrong. It’s about as boring as it can get.
The fauna? Equally yawn inducing. This is open range.
I’ve ridden and driven through countless miles of open range and hardly never, if ever, have actually seen cattle. Here? Cowabunga! There are cows everywhere.
For the most part we’ve settled on a truce with the understanding that I’m just out wandering to get some miles in my legs, and they are just standing around to eat and get some pounds in their bellies.
Just about the time I’ve become immune to their presence, I startle a mother with two calves. As they spring up from lounging in the shade to the side and trot deeper into the woods, the loud cracks of branches and thuds of their hooves remind me that these creatures weight north of a thousand pounds.
I wonder just how pissed a mother Cow gets when her young are startled, and how she might respond. Over and over I’m comforted to know the typical answer is run away.
Then I surprise another mother, and while she ducks farther up a creek, her offspring leaps into the middle of the road and starts running away. I stop to let him go back to mama, and he pauses to stare.
Yes, we all know what that looks like — an utterly dumbstruck Cow.
He turns and runs up the road farther. I ride on, figuring sooner or later he will dart into the woods and double back. About a half mile later I’m reminded that I’ve heard Cows aren’t the smartest creatures around.
After a number of starts and stops, stares and turns, I see through a clearing on the hill that the road bends around. I stop, pick up my bike, and climb the hill, through the clearing, to get in front of the calf on the road. He finally chugs down the road back toward mom.
Most of my summer rides go down like this. We’re not at some mountain bike mecca or tourist trap. We’re out in the middle of nowhere — typically the only places we can find campgrounds with first-come first-serve sites.
Then we just wander and explore.
Our camping cycling schedule works like this: My wife rides in the cool mornings and I saddle up mid-day.
More often than not, like this instance, I’m armed with nothing more than a cellphone photo of artwork that somewhat resembles a map posted somewhere at the campground with no disclaimer that it isn’t really a map.
It should read like the opposite of the my passenger sideview mirror, that warns “things are closer than they appear,” the map confessing “routes are much, much, much, much longer than they appear.”
That map-ish thing down at the campground showed there’s a trail up the road somewhere, and that leads up toward Council Mountain. That sounds kinda cool to me, so, of course, I’m going for it.
After 90 minutes of climbing/cow chasing, I see a bent, beat-up trailhead sign that simply reads 198. Gold. It appears I can take that to 205, and take 205 back down to the forest road an home, according to that map.
A few moments on 198 and I’m convinced this is nothing more than a cow trail — mainly due to the lack of any human tracks be they boot or tire, the abundance of hoof prints and cow patties along with the fact that it’s too steep to be rideable.
Just when I’m prepared to abandon this mission, it flattens a bit. Still no sign any human has been here this millennium, but at least it’s rideable. So I continue.
It’s more of the same. Steep bike hike, flat fun. After another hour of this — I’m privately digging the tough workout naively confident that I won’t be coming back down this trail, not today, not tomorrow, not ever — I exit the forest to a stunning view of exposed peaks and endless wildflowers blanketing the hillsides.
Beautiful, except for one thing. No obviously recognizable trail. Just more cow trails. A lot more cow trails. So I note an easily recognizable tree scrag to be my marker to return to the forest if for some unforeseen reason I might just have to return.
The scenery transports me to another world. I keep my eye occasionally backward to the marker tree while I actually ride a bit of trail-ish sort of rut here and one there, climbing gently toward some kind of summit.
Some ruts last a few hundred yards and die out, prompting me to go back and try another. After two or three unsuccessful attempts, one turns into what actually seems like a real trail.
It climbs up into a stand of trees and, YES! It’s an obvious fork in the trail with two options!
I decide it’s time to seriously refill my tank since I’m well into hour three. As I move toward some shade something catches my eye in the brush well off the trail. It’s a trail sign. It says 198. It’s leaning up against a tree with no way to decipher the correct direction at this split.
Yep, you guessed it. Time to turn around. Another out and back today, folks.
Thanks to the endless descent — which included at one time spooking a gang of about 20 cows into a ramble-rousing stampede through the forest just 10 yards from the trail, then cutting across the trail just in front of me, I made it back to camp after 5.5 hours.
That’s how I spend most of my summer rides, a wandering with my knapsack on my back, like an outdoor version of Bruce Springsteen riding, “Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.”
Time to ride.
