Our campsite with the sunrise.
I was sleeping last night, dreaming it was raining. Turns out it really was raining…lightly. There was also some lightening and thunder. Ah yes, an Idaho Mountain summer thunderstorm. I closed the door on my rainfly, and went back to sleep.
We actually slept in a little bit. But then it was back to riding, with a 3/4 mile climb right out of our campsite. But, it was good gravel. We then had another long climb that took us high above the St. Maries River.
Jana
The river down below.
Coming back down to the river.
After 17 miles, we rolled into St. Maries. We stopped for a bit of resupply at Archie’s (an IGA).
We asked where there was a good breakfast or lunch place. The clerk said Timber Lodge Cafe. We headed there and had some delicious second breakfast (I had French toast of course).
Next thing was, as you can probably guess, was another big climb. It was getting quite warm, but the higher we climbed the “cooler” it got. Then there was another weird part (not really bushwhacking, but initially a headscratcher.
Yeah, this was uphill and I walked.
This is the route. I had to walk up with my phone to make sure which way we were supposed to go. It ended up being the top of the climb, and we had a long downhill, which spit us out onto Hwy 3. We had 2.2 miles on the hwy before turning off to head over to the Trail of the Couer d’ Alenes. It was an awesome downhill. Unfortunately, I was the last one. Jana had stopped and as I went by, I told her about the next turn. I got to the turn, which was very easy to miss. No Steph or Ginny. Oops, Jana and I were pretty sure they had missed the turn. We continued on hoping they would figure out soon.
Jana and I came onto the Trail of the Couer d’ Alenes. This was a section I had not done before (turns out, a kind of boring section).
The Medimont TH.
We stopped at the Medimont TH. We had talked about a possible camping option at Medimont. We didn’t have phone service. Just as we were about to go to where we would get off the trail, and see if they were there, here they came along the trail!
This was the place to go off route to a convenience store for ice cream. We were hoping to find some camping options, as we were done, even though we hadn’t done the all the miles we planned (no surprise there…we set our ambitions high).
We looked at aplace called Rainy Hill. But then Ginny found there was an actual campground not far from the Valley Mart. And, the best news of all? SHOWERS!!! We had refreshments at the Valley Mart, then rode on to Quiet Nook Campground. It was a quaint little private campground that did, indeed, have showers! First we went swimming in the lake, then took the best showers ever!!!
We did some route calculations. We had 44 miles to go, and had to get to CdA by 5:00 so Bethany could pack up her bike, and we could get her to the airport by 8:00pm for her 10:00pm flight. Factor in that we had not finished that much mileage in that timeframe on any day of this trip, plus there were two major climbs, and several smaller ones. Let’s just say, it wasn’t looking good. After trying to figure out alternatives, we ended up just planning to get as early a start as possible. We got as much ready ahead of time as possible, and went to bed.
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