This is one of a series of blog posts about my summer motorcycle travels.
One of the primary goals of this trip was to ride a substantial portion of the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR), a dirt and back road route that runs from the south edge of Idaho up to the Canadian border. Given our time constraints, were planning on riding from just south of the town of Pine up to Pierce.
The first leg of that was interfered with by our need to go spend time in Boise, but we still had a great time riding north on Idaho Highway 55. We had a half-hour long segment that was filled with curves, elevation changes, magnificent scenery, and very light traffic. To use the vernacular of another age, it was an E-Ticket ride. (Which is also how Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut, described being launched into space on the shuttle.)
We then turned east on Warm Lake Road which 30 or 40 miles later dropped us off on the dirt road/BDR route that would shortly lead us into Yellow Pine. Yellow Pine is an old mining town that’s now home to a bar, a really good restaurant, a few places to stay, and small but eclectic population.
Howard turns north toward Yellow Pine.
We had a wonderful dinner and breakfast at the Corner bar and grill, with Matt as our host. The night we were there he was the cook, waitstaff, cashier, bartender and dishwasher. I had a smoked brisket salad with black bean and corn relish that would have done credit to a fine restaurant in a major city, while Howard had a similar smoked chicken salad. They even had non-alcoholic beer, which remote, little places almost never have. Matt and his wife own and run the place, and as I noted in the first post of this series, people and places like this are a big part of why I love to travel to remote and new places.
Chef Matt (and waiter, cashier, bartender, dish washer)
That night we stayed in a room we rented behind the general store. It was spartan, but it was clean, had decent beds, and hot water. There was no air conditioning, but once the sun went down, it was almost cold out.
The big challenge was figuring out how to reach the guy who would be our landlord. When I made the reservation, it was using Facebook Messenger with a couple-day interval between each response. When we arrived in Yellow Pine, we had virtually no phone service, so we went to talk to Matt at the Corner, and he made the call to the store owner for us, calling us “a couple of BDR-looking types.” Still not sure from his tone of voice whether that was a good or bad thing…. (Though he was absolutely welcoming to us as customers.)
The only real negative we had in our stay in Yellow Pine was that the mosquitos were fairly thick, so we couldn’t sit outside and enjoy the cool night mountain air.
Ralph and Howard at The Corner.
Coming up next – our journey reaches an early and unexpected ending, (Uh-oh, that sounds like foreshadowing… dun, dun, dun….)