Silver Lake
It has been a casual ride down from our customary mountain keep on ever widening, faster roads. Jeremy and Joel have the lead this morning. I’m trying to hang back out of their dust.
We chatted a few minutes, earlier, with a couple guys in a group of six riding the opposite way on KTM 890s. They shipped their bikes from Ontario, Canada to Calgary, they tell us, and are riding down the Idaho Back Country Discovery Route then to Utah’s BDR and others.
“Camping as you go?” I ask, noticing bags equal to our own.
“Nah,” the nearest rider says.
I guess if you’re wanting to get in some miles, as they seem to be, the every day camp tear down and set up would be inconvenient. But it does give me a tiny opening to mentally reclaim some riding bona fides in spite of our much shorter adventure.
The tunnel along Fishhook Creek foreshadows many more we’ll see later today on Moon Pass Road, vestiges of the Milwaukee rail line of the latter 1800s.
We meet the sparkling St. Joe River a few miles after the tunnel and minutes later are forming a line at the single, old gas pump in front of the Avery Store (I guess it’s time to stop calling it Scheffy’s).
I suppose it takes a special person to be a proprietor at one of these barely-a-town, sell-a-bit-of-everything stores. We still talk about the lady at the J&E Stop in Clarkia who came out with a hammer to fix the gas pump by hitting it. And another year, her yelling at Jeremy when he moved to make his own selection from the wall behind the counter.
And I think about the grizzled man making us burgers in the back of the Y-Stop. Or the pie service in Silver City.
Here in Avery, we remember the elderly couple, a bit cantankerous, cooking us a “lunch” of fried cheese sticks, and wonder, with a bit of a laugh, if we’ll see them today.
The young lady’s friendly greeting from behind the till in Avery is a bit like discovering you have cell service atop a desolate mountain — more civilization than we wanted. We miss the cranky old couple.
While Jeremy is finishing there, and since our miles today aren’t many, Joel and I decide we should sit a spell in The Fire Pit, a new-ish little restaurant beside the store. We walk over, find stools in front of a fan and sit wondering if Jeremy will find us.
Well, he does find us, and after some IPAs and quite nice pizza, we ride up Moon Pass Road, through its seven tunnels, past the Hiawatha Bike Trail parking lot, and up to the ridge top forest road bordering Montana.
From the state line dirt road, we make the rocky climb to an old fire lookout site, overlooking Montana. From here we can see clouds building above and wonder if the storm warnings may yet come true. We should probably get our tents up sooner rather than later.
We find it curious that a kind of cemetery has developed here. Seven or eight markers, most professionally cut metal or granite like you’d see at an official cemetery, are affixed to the slope facing Montana.
I begin to have some concerns that we won’t be alone at the lake when the access road, just a few miles past the old lookout, turns out to be Subaru-passable. I’m relieved to find nobody here as we reach the lake. That would have been weird.
The area around our campsite is picked clean of deadfall so Jeremy, ever industrious, sets about some flip-flop, motorcycle skidding to gather wood from up the road.
The rest of us brothers often joke that when we’d like Jeremy to take care of something, we need only feign incompetence and he’ll jump right in. But Jeremy hasn’t given us time to “forget” how to light a fire or collect wood. He’s moving fast today.
A large, metal memorial plaque is bolted to a big rock bordering the campsite. There are a couple similar plaques on the outcrop at the Crater Peak campground, near last night’s stay. And I’ve seen another in Leslie Gulch — all for lives overlapping our own; fairly recent.
It makes me wonder how these places will look in twenty years.
For what it’s worth, these places are all National Forest (as best I can see) which has a policy (2723.32.1) to allow memorials only on fixtures donated for public benefit such as a trailside bench or campsite picnic table. To me, that does seem a nicer way to publicly remember someone.
We are happy for a lake to bathe in after a hot and dusty day but must first find a way to make it work. The bottom is so soft, so infused with bits of buoyant wood, that merely disturbing the water above causes a plume of debris. I think it’s making us dirtier.
Like everything when we’re together, this is a laughing matter.
Our stand-by camping banter is to imagine ironic marketing slogans for things around us, usually in the form of a main slogan then a whispered follow-up, representing the small print.
Like, “Mountain House: delicious freeze dried meals,” then a whispered, “not for human consumption.”
We make them up for our tents, utensils, sleeping bags, whatever. We can laugh ourselves to tears this way.
And we talk about real things too, like our parents, our kids, our lives. This night we touch on times it’s been difficult to connect with our kids. We reflect on our own childhoods, filled with imaginative play, with Legos and Tonkas and bugs, carried through our lives, now taking the form of silly, imagined slogans around a campfire.
We consider how our kids’ experiences differ from that, a divide that can require intention to cross.
Wind picks up as evening falls. Trees around us begin to whisper of things to come.
And my chair keeps blowing into the fire.
Like smoke in your face no matter where you move around the campfire, there’s plainly something supernatural at play. Our three chairs have all stood empty around the fire at times, in various places as we’ve negotiated the smoke, and yet only my chair has blown into the fire — three times!
And thus we are blessed with another laughing matter.
Jeremy describes moths swarming up behind us as we rode down to the lake earlier. Joel and I didn’t notice it behind us but moths have been thick since we arrived, so it’s easy to believe. The lake surface is littered with their dead, another thing we had to avoid while bathing.
As it gets darker, we notice them gathering on Joel’s new tent, though I can’t see any moths at all on mine or Jeremy’s tent.
In a way, this isn’t surprising. A video about Joel’s tent explains, “Each and everything has its own unique vibrations, somewhere between the nexus of nature and the mind’s eye. We call this thing, ‘camp vibes’.”*
The moths are obviously in tune with his tent’s vibrations.
Although Jeremy and I think it could be quite funny if a bunch of moths make it inside his tent, we join forces with Joel to face the threat together (meaning Jeremy and I take pictures).
We watch as the sky fills with lightning, counting the seconds before thunder. Finally, threats are made good and rain begins to fall. It’s finally happening.
We were ready and happily retreat to our tents to enter dreamland beneath the soothing patter of rain.
It rained steadily for a bit last night but it’s sunny when we awaken and the ground is nearly dry. We sit around the fire enjoying coffee, finding new things to laugh about, then slowly begin gathering gear for the ride onward.
The road down from the ridge, above what I called “Subaru-passable,” is littered with what two-wheeled riders commonly call baby heads, meaning loose rocks between the size of, say, a baseball and a baby’s head. We have to ride back up that this morning before continuing along the ridge.
Baby heads are the worst. Or at least tricky, deflecting tires in unexpected directions.
“Why don’t you guys go first and I’ll record video,” I suggest. They offer silent assent. I hope something cool happens.
by Jason Abbott