Despite feeling a bit beat when I got to Wallace, I woke up feeling well rested and decided to start the day on the BDR. I wandered around town and found a breakfast place to fuel myself for the day and ended up running into an old timer on a BMW GS on his way back from home to Wyoming from the BMW Rally in Seattle. He’d done the trip up to Deadhorse, AK a few years back and gave me a few tips & highlights to hit on the way up and I gave him some ideas for a trip he was planning to the East Coast.
It didn’t take long for things to go a little bit wrong when the road I was supposed to take out of town was closed with no detour. The Garmin was able to find a path around on forest service roads by backtracking west two towns, and these rugged, steep dirt tracks ended up being the most interesting riding of the morning. Almost the entire section of the BDR from Wallace to Clark Fork was a bypass because of construction near the end of the segment — similar to the problems I had the previous day, there just aren’t alternatives to some of the roads deep in the mountains and going around means adding dozens of miles to the route.
The alternative bypass was a combination of pavement and graded forest service roads and started by following the Little North Fork Coeur d’Alene River for some time. This is clearly a popular area for RVs and long-term campers in the national forest, and almost every primitive site along the route was taken up by extensive camps with all manner of powersports equipment parked up. The road was correspondingly a bit corrugated and potholed from all the heavy RV traffic, which kept speeds a bit lower than the road surface would otherwise have allowed. Even still, I made pretty good time and let myself take a few rest/snack/coffee stops to enjoy my last day in the States for a while.
Eventually the road climbed back up into the mountains, gaining over 1,000 ft in elevation in just a few miles. The road got correspondingly more interesting, and the rest of the route into Clark Fork was genuinely a blast. It wasn’t super technical, but there were some fun hill climbs, the dirt had great traction, and there were plenty of twists and a few whoops & g-outs.
After hitting Clark Fork I decided to skip the final segment of the BDR and head straight to my AirBNB in Creston, BC. The route was half pavement anyway and the best of the mountains were behind me. The final leg of the route through ID was beautiful, following along rivers and lakes until reaching the border right around 4pm.
My BNB was about halfway between the border and the town of Creston, BC on a little horse farm with chickens running around. I got unpacked and realized that there were no delivery options around and headed into town for dinner & supplies. The wifi hasn’t been great, but I had enough to upload photos and have a pixely video call with Tori to hear about how her mining excursion has been going in Arkansas.
Tomorrow will be my first rest day since setting off 11 days ago. It’ll be a good chance to fine-tune my route for the next week (looks like rain and maybe snow for my night camping near Jasper in a few days) and make a call on changing tires early.
