INTRODUCTIONA whole bunch of things can happen in six years. Shoot, a whole universe flipped somersaults in the last four years. Say the “P” word with me.
Six years ago, this space described a seventy-five-year-old waddler and his slightly younger partner, B. B. Hardbody, hiking seventy-five trails around Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Sandpoint during the summer of 2016. Now, at eighty-one (and slightly younger) we’ve retraced our footsteps on many of those trails. More importantly, we found a few new pathways that are more fun and interesting than the treks we’ve replaced.
Back in the day, six years ago, I was an old stumblewheezer who couldn’t walk a mile before I collapsed on the trail like a wilted balsamroot. Today, I am proud to say that I can still collapse on the trail, though with six years of practice I am much more accomplished at finding the softest places to land. If five decades of backcountry skiing taught me anything, it’s how to land with the least chance of damaging anything important.
While most everything urban—restaurant and pub visits, movie audiences, sports crowds—were shrinking, the trails gained users faster than a northern flicker can hammer that it owns your rain gutter. The great outdoors was the only place you could go to avoid the deadly ’rona, so Hardbody and I were not as alone as we were six years ago in tromping the wooded routes of Mount Spokane or the pocked plains of Fishtrap. The crowds made it no less pleasurable; in fact we were happy to make these newcomers feel welcome. I often demonstrated this by allowing them to trip merrily ahead, especially where stinging nettle or rain-drenched serviceberry and ocean spray hung over the trail, or rattlesnakes or wood ticks shared the path.
Cruel? Mean-spirited? I think not. B. B. and I have had the better part of sixty or seventy years crashing brush, stepping on snakes, pulling ticks off our bodies, and licking melted chocolate off our pack pockets. It’s time to encourage new blood, though perhaps not literally.
Since returning to our native Inland Northwest in 2008, B. B. and I have hiked many of the pathways we walked long decades ago. She spent several years as a Ferris High School student fascinated by falconry, tooling trails around Rimrock and Deep Creek, spotting roosting and nesting sites of birds of prey. As many as fifty youngsters joined me to stride some of those same trails with a guy named George Libby, back in the 1950s. We both came to love hiking the pine woods around Spokane, and we gained an appreciation of nature and passion for the wildlands that propels us up the trail today.
Both our experiences then were limited to a relatively small area around Spokane, so we’ve spent the last decade getting to know routes that are more far-flung: the high country of the Selkirks and Cabinets, the rolling green of the Palouse, the lakes and mining country of the Idaho Panhandle and Bitterroots. Acquaintance with these new trails has been a delightful, though at times exhausting experience.
Some of our most recent outdoor adventures in this neck of the woods have been with Washington Trails Association volunteers in improving and building new Inland Northwest trails. You’ll find a couple mentioned in this edition, including brand-new routes near Antoine Peak and Mount Spokane. While I can say with certainty I contributed to at least two feet of the new path at Etter Ranch, memory dims beyond that initial effort largely because my exhausted stupor quickly overcame any ability to operate anything larger than a weeding trowel.
Hardbody, on the other hand, was a root-destroying, stump-whacking, path-pulverizing monster, a human D9 Caterpillar whose trail-building prowess resembled the superpowers of a Marvel character. Jane Baker, our trail boss, would point up the intended route of the new trail and exclaim, “B. B.! Go!”
B. B. would go and in a trice, a new trail would appear. Or so it seemed to me.
Some of my old hiking friends from the wet side of the Cascades might suggest I’m being too modest about my hiking or trail-traveling experience. After all, they say, you were the outdoor editor for a daily newspaper for seventeen years and hiked, pedaled, and paddled throughout the Pacific Northwest. And I must admit, my vast knowledge as a professional outdoorsman has been most welcome on many an outing in the Inland Northwest these past six years.
I recall the time, a couple of years ago, Hardbody and I set out to climb up to Lone Lake (Hike 59). As you may know, the Lone Lake “Trail” begins as a four-wheel-drive route from the wide NorPac and Stevens Lakes Trailhead above Mullan, Idaho. You climb on the route for about a half mile to where the trail disappears to the left into brush beside the West Fork of Willow Creek. It was here that yours truly, the outdoors professional, declared that we should follow the road to the right.
It took several switchbacks and 800 vertical feet before I gathered courage to admit that it was not the trail to Lone Lake, which Hardbody had been suggesting for at least a mile. This is how B. B. suggests: “You weeniehead! You’ve lost us again.”
Big deal.
To save face and my sullied rep, I alleged that I bypassed the trail intentionally to lead us to one of the very best huckleberry patches in the world. We picked a couple of liters in a matter of minutes (leaving, of course, some for the bears), then returned to the trailhead. I considered claiming a broken ankle so as to avoid climbing to Lone Lake, but by then it was way too late in the day, so we adjourned to the 1313 Club in Wallace to rehydrate.
The trails around Sandpoint, Coeur d’Alene, and Spokane challenge the foot soldier, bike rider, or trail rider with a variety that is tough to find anywhere else in the country. Thirty miles east of Spokane, you’ll walk to rock-walled lakes hiding in pockets gouged by an ancient flood. Thirty miles west, you’ll climb forested foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Coeur d’Alene and the river valleys nearby provide miles of rainforest-like trekking, while Sandpoint can put you on mountain trails that rival any in the Cascades. It’s truly a feast for outdoors-loving gourmands, a region where you might spend a lifetime exploring.
It was around 1952 when I first tracked dirt from the Indian Painted Rocks Trail (Hike 18) onto my mother’s wool carpet, which she observed with little enthusiasm. Seven decades later, it’s still one of my favorite treks—although these days it takes me about twice as long to cover the four miles out and back from the trailhead. That’s not altogether a bad thing, because I see a good deal more of the things I might have missed as a youngster. The miniature sand traps of ant lions. The heron imitating a barren tree branch in the Little Spokane River. The wasp nest hanging from a limb above the trail.
If there’s a single good thing about getting old—and I believe there are many—it would be the fact that I carry a backpack full of seven decades of memories. I recall running, climbing, walking, and waddling along hundreds and likely thousands of miles of wild pathways from Alaska to North Carolina, from New Mexico to the Canadian Rockies. I can say without reservation that many of my favorite recollections were added to that overstuffed pack in the last six years, on trails where my love of nature was born eight decades ago.
May this guide present the opportunity for you to discover at least one walk on the wild side you’ll remember as long. Carry water. Watch for snakes and other critters.
--Seabury Blair Jr.
Copyright © 2023 by Blair Jr., Seabury. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
