Pass To Prosperity Murray, Thompson Falls Merchants Hope Paving Road Will Add Sales

A new highway over Thompson Pass may as well be paved with gold as far as eager shop owners on either end are concerned.

The 31-mile highway connects tiny Murray to Thompson Falls, Mont. The 10-mile stretch in Idaho opened Saturday. It took 2-1/2 years and $10 million to build.

While some of Murray’s 50 residents worry that the smooth, new road will open the floodgates to a barrage of motorists, ruining the town’s homey feel, Connie Roath is thrilled.

“A lot of people in town are not looking forward to it because of traffic,” said Roath, owner of the Spragpole Inn and Museum here. “But I’m sorry, I live here and I’ve got a business.

“It can’t do anything but good.”

Michelle and George Marker, tourists from Sandpoint, stopped at the Spragpole for cold drinks after cruising the new highway. They came specifically to see the new road, they said.

Before the work began, the couple remembered how getting over the 4,852-foot-high Thompson Pass meant taking a narrow gravel road up to the Montana border, where it abruptly became a two-lane highway.

“It just wasn’t worth those 10 miles” on the Idaho side, Michelle Marker said. “You could meet a car and it was hard for you both to get by.”

Motorcyclists felt the same way, Roath said.

“They wouldn’t take that road,” she said. “But just this year, they’ve all said, ‘We’re all going to come this way.”’ An alternate route from the Coeur d’Alene area to Thompson Falls takes drivers north to Sandpoint then southeast on State Route 200, bypassing Murray. The opening of Thompson Pass shaves 40 miles off the trek, said Sharon Skinner, who works at Lucky Lil’s Casino in Thompson Falls.

“I’m so glad. It’s so nice,” she said of the new road as she took customers’ drink orders.

Moments later, one of them asked her how to get to Murray.

The opening of the pass “can’t hurt” businesses in Thompson Falls, said Karla Moss, a clerk at a gas station there.

“We answer a lot of questions every day about that pass,” she said. “(Customers) seem really enthused that it’s open.”

The highway is flatter and wider than the old road, not to mention paved. Trees cover the hills on either side and there are numerous pullouts for putting on snow chains.

As drivers head west from Thompson Falls, a sign just before the Idaho portion of the road begins still falsely warns, “Pavement Ends.”

Business people are so excited about the new highway that they’re planning a celebratory barbecue at the pass on Aug. 30 - the official opening of the road - at 2 p.m.