The first time I heard that people were taking chairlifts and gondolas to the top of ski areas and they riding their mountain bikes down, my reaction, and possibly my comments to anyone listening, wasn’t open-minded in the way I’d like to think I am. Dismissive. Gawd, I was as wrong about lift-served mountain biking as I was STI.
That elitist snobbery that can flourish within people who think they’ve got “it” all figured out is a blight upon a great life, or at least, when I’ve done it, it’s been a blight upon my own life. Ah, it’s better to be late to the party than to miss it entirely.
When I think back on my various experiences doing lift-served mountain biking, my best experience in terms of pairing bike with mountain—and no, I wasn’t trying to make a comparison to pairing wine and food, but, oops, there it is, and son of a gun if it doesn’t line up? Where was I? Right: bike and mountain. It was a Specialized product intro at Copper Mountain and I rode their then-new Enduro with 29-inch wheels. The concept made terrific sense to me and I rode terrain that would have been unthinkable on lesser bikes.
I mention this because for this trip I brought my Ibis Ripley AF. This is a 130mm front/120mm rear travel trail bike and on the terrain on which I subject it in the Seattle area it is a dream—all the bike I need for the way I ride.
At Schweitzer, I could tell the Ripley was under-powered; another 10mm of travel would have been handy, and 20mm would probably have been even better. But so long as I didn’t hit anything too hard and made sure to soak up the bigger impacts, it was fine.
Silver Mountain Resort, in Kellogg, Idaho, roughly 45 minutes east of Coeur d’Alene (make sure to say core daLANE I was informed) in Northern Idaho, proved that renting a bike from the ski area in question is often the better move, but I’ll get to that. Bottom line: A trail bike is not the pro move at Silver Mountain, but I went with it because I wanted to be on a bike I knew well. This is a mountain where a 150mm fork is the starting point.
The Resort
Silver Mountain boasts a 3400-foot drop from the top of the mountain back to town with 39 trails built to modern bike park standards. Shuttling riders to the top of the mountain is a 3.1-mile gondola that starts right in Kellogg. The bulk of the trails—29 of them—rank as intermediate or advanced. The mountain offers enough challenge that I stuck to the easy and intermediate trails.
Mike Wirth, the former editor of Mountain Bike Action, and I rode together a fair amount over the week and in comparing notes we concluded that the easy trails at Silver Mountain presented a roughly equivalent level of challenge to the intermediate trails at Schweitzer. Ski area relativity is one of those quirks I’m surprised has survived into the 21st century.
Riding with Mike made me rue the fact that I didn’t know him when we were both attending media events like Press Camp; following him was a delight and he cracked me up every time he modestly billed himself as a cross country rider. His form on the bike is grace in movement. That’s him in the opening image.
The trails ranged from as narrow as 2 feet wide in some spots to as sweeping as 8 or 10 feet in some of the switchbacks. Like Schweitzer, the closer to the top of the mountain I was, the rockier the terrain I rolled. As we arrived at the tail-end of the season, some of the trails suffered braking bumps and the odd divot, and to call the conditions dusty undersells how much of the brown pow-pow we sent flying. None of that spoiled the fun of riding the trails, but I can see that for a less-accomplished rider, arriving in June would offer a better opportunity to build skills.
Silver Mountain carries a burly demeanor. In the biggest switchbacks the drop from top to bottom co-opted gravity in a way that would allow a good rider to use them for acceleration. Such big switchbacks include a hidden benefit: It’s possible to steer around the biggest late-season blowouts.
Laps are fun
The very word “laps” conjures angry P.E. teachers and coaches punishing kids for being kids. Or, at least, it did until I developed a taste for dropping Jackass and El Burro Loco to Moose Knuckle, which takes you back to Chair 3. This makes for quick returns to the top of the mountain. The trail map does a great job of showing which trails exist within the Chair 3 network and those which, upon drop-in, make for a point-of-no-return and trip to the bottom of the mountain and the 25 minute ride back up on the gondola.
Oops
Two days of lift/shuttle riding in my body (my arms were every bit as tired as my legs) robbed me of my snappiest moves and my ability to hold a descending position for upwards of 10 minutes at a time. I’d forgotten how much my quads could hurt from pursuing flowy Nirvana. Hell, one night, simply snapping my toothpaste tube’s cap shut caused me to flex my lats (strange, I know) and I discovered that they were sore.
That’s the backstory to the bit where I dropped into one of the intermediate trails, rolled down some pavers placed to fix a rut and then failed to assist the 130mm fork in absorbing the single foot drop to the trail below. I felt the fork bottom out. It was a novel experience; I tend to err on the side of too much pressure rather than too little. Much as I wanted to continue chasing challenging terrain, I realized I was just too fatigued to ride with my full abilities. That meant letting Mike hang with our guide and Jennifer and I decided to take a mix of blues and greens to the bottom of the mountain so we could make our way to the resort’s water park and its hot tub therein.
Just as Jennifer and I were about to roll into Payday, a green that loops back and forth across the mountain I looked down and noticed a sheen of oil on the left stanchion. Gads. This was definitely our last run. Poor seal. Guess it’s time to get the fork serviced, huh?
Family fun
The genius of Silver Mountain Resort is that once you park, you don’t need to get back in your vehicle except to drive to restaurants, and even that isn’t necessary. The Silver Rapids Water Park is a fully indoor attraction that could eclipse the mountain with some folks. It leaned heavy on stuff for younger kids, but there was something for everyone. The Gold Rush water slide curled and dove just quickly enough to make me grin, but it was the Moose Sluice family raft ride (a roughly 6-foot-diameter, circular raft) that made me giggle like a toddler.
Lift tickets go for $51.95 for adults and $39.95 for kids 4-12. Compared to lift tickets for a day of skiing, that’s a bargain. A near constant mantra we heard everywhere we went at the ski areas was how the resorts in Northern Idaho pride themselves on keeping recreation affordable, or at least more affordable than the top-shelf draws like Vail and Park City.
The milkshake
Once we’d finished sloshing around the water park, we headed for Wallace, a town even smaller than Kellogg. We met Matt Sawyer at the Blackboard Cafe for dinner. Matt was to be our guide for the next day’s ride and he acquainted us with the town’s former reputation as the wickedest town in the U.S., a distinction still worn with pride, though the brothels have been replaced with breweries. Outside of the riding, hearing stories about the history of Northern Idaho turned out to be the next most interesting part of the trip.
I can’t recommend the Blackboard Cafe’s lasagna, but their milkshake game is world class. Honestly, I find the hit-and-miss nature of small towns like Wallace (pop. 823), part of the fun. Wallace, we learned, is the self-anointed center of the universe, and who am I to argue?