Mountain air. Somehow, desipte the changes in foliage, in latitude, elevation, governance or even moon phase, mountain air always seems to smell the same. It seems devoid of car pollution, pollen, mold and even scented candles. If melted ice had a smell, this is what it would be.
It was on my fourth trip up the mountain at Schweitzer Ski Area that I caught the elegant perfume, a scent to anodyne as to barely exist. How I can smell a non-smell I can’t tell you, but I recognized the air the way I would recognize my mother’s perfume, but with more enthusiasm.
Schweitzer Mountain in Sand Point, Idaho, is one of the northernmost ski areas in the U.S. and offers a substantial network, with 16 different trails descending 1700 feet, from where the Great Escape Quad drops riders at the top of the mountain, back to the village.
By their own admission, the staff at Schweitzer report that the trails are rocky, and they aren’t off even a little bit; shale erupts from the soil, in shapes that feature far more sharp edges than I’d prefer, but weren’t hard to learn how to float over.
Snacks
Of the countless road rides I’ve done, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve stopped to pick fruit. Summer mountain bike rides, on the other hand, are characterized by berry picking. We encountered both huckleberries and raspberries lining the trails in places and allowed ourselves time outs to pull over and pick some berries. I may be alone in this assessment, but the raspberries punked the huckleberries. The huckleberry lemonade at Sky House—the restaurant at the top of the mountain—was every bit as good as it sounds. The gingersnap cookie and huckleberry ice cream sandwich carved out a space in my heart that an It’s-It can’t fill. (Probably.)
A one-day lift pass goes for $50 for adults, while everyone else gets $5 off. Relative to the pricing I’ve seen at other ski areas, the population of riders on the hill and the quality of the trails, I have to say that $50 is a deal. Outside of the group of riders I was riding with, I saw maybe a dozen other riders. This is the end of the season at Schweitzer, so attendance is not what it was in June. To be frank, the trails weren’t either. They suffer from stretches of braking bumps, the occasional hole and floating dust. Though the trails weren’t in tip-top shape, they still rode well, which speaks to how wel designed they are. That I could float through some of the sections of stutter bumps gave me confidence that I wasn’t underserved by riding a 120mm-travel trail bike.
On the ground
The trails at Schweitzer hew to the machine-cut flowy singletrack flavor. Because they run anywhere from 3 ft. to 5 ft. wide, there’s generally adequate room to avoid the sharpest slices of shale. My favorite among them was Terraflow, which balanced an overall consistent loss in elevation with occasional rises that helped scrub speed prior to entering sweeping turns and switchbacks.
I’m not one to suffer performance anxiety, but when I’m doing lift-served mountain biking, I can find myself concerned about whether or not I’m going fast enough to stay ahead of the 12 year old behind me who just threw a backflip off one of the snowboard features. Simply pulling over to catch my breath has sometimes caused me to worry about whether or not I was getting out of the way quickly enough. That was not a problem at Schweitzer, and because the population was modest—and that’s including the hikers who were forbidden from hiking the MTB trails—my wait time in the lift line remained limited to the time necessary to drop the bike into the carrier.
We stayed at the Humbird Lodge, a ski-in-ski out location notable for its kind-size bed, walk-in shower and exceptional pillows.
Jennifer and I had an adventure in the afternoon—her phone flew out of her hydration pack. The event served to prove the utility of Apple’s FindMy app, and gave me the opportunity to cook the first 3/4 of the descent. The app did not indicate the trails, but I was able to recreate our previous path and found her phone … on a trail on which we did not ride. Life can be strange.
Vacations, however, deserve to be a break from the tedium of daily life. I could spend a week here and not tire of the dirt waves.
Patrick’s accommodations and meals were provided by Ski Idaho.