Reconstructed trails make easier climb to a Selkirk high

Newly reconstructed trails are rolling out the welcome mat to choice but largely ignored scenic destinations in the Idaho Selkirk Mountains.

Even though some work won’t be finished until next summer – including some blasting, bridges and trail hardening – I took advantage of last Sunday’s brilliant fall weather to hike the freshly rerouted, brushed and well-designed trails to Snow and Bottleneck lakes.

The new trails up the Snow Creek Road west of Naples matched the day.

Pat Hart, trail maintenance coordinator for the Bonners Ferry Ranger district had pointed out earlier this summer that my entry in the revised “100 Hikes in the Inland Northwest” says the footpath into Bottleneck Lake “varies from great to wretched and will remain so until the Forest Service decides to change its course through a few wet areas.”

“You were right,” she said, “and now we’ve fixed that problem. The new trails are great.”

She wasn’t kidding.

Using a creative collection of paid trail crew and volunteer work groups and several funding sources, including a $1,000 grant from the “100 Hikes in the Inland Northwest” trail fund, Hart and her crews have directed trails out of alder-choked bogs and onto hillsides at grades that will please hikers and mountain bikers alike.

Tracks in the trail indicated the area’s moose like the new trails, too.

Hart said her regular eight-person trail crew worked with three different volunteer work groups to get the job going this summer. The groups included 15 teenage girls from Camp Thunderbird in Minnesota, eight people from the American Hiking Society’s Volunteer Vacations program and 10 volunteers from the Sierra Club’s volunteer vacations program.

“Forest Service money for trail building and maintenance is really tight,” Hart said. “The Sierra Club’s been sending work parties to this district for 30 years and the Hiking Society has been coming for 20 years.”

The routes sometimes follow old poorly designed roads that were built into the area to salvage timber after the 1967 Sundance forest fire.

“The area has had a lot of problems with erosion so it’s closed to motor vehicles,” Hart said. “We had to do all of the work by hand.”

Either Snow Lake or Bottleneck Lake is a worthwhile day hike or overnight destination. Snow Lake holds a few cutthroat trout and lower Bottleneck has brook trout.

But the lakes aren’t the main attraction to a hiker willing to put in extra effort to reach some of the best views in the Selkirk Mountains. Scramble routes from either lake lead to Bottleneck Peak, where you can sit on huge granite slabs and let your jaw drop.

The premier way to enjoy both trails and the best views in a one-day trip is to link them with a rugged scramble up and down the mostly open ridge that separates the two drainages.

Here’s the route and new-trail notes I took last Sunday while hiking with Jared and Coral France of Sandpoint:

The trailhead is 9.5 miles up Snow Creek Road 402 northwest of Naples. (This road is clearly shown on the Kaniksu National Forest map. It’s the same road that continues on to Roman Nose Lakes.)

A new sign posted at the trailhead pegs the mileage at more than four miles to Snow Lakes and more than five miles to Bottleneck Lake. We hiked uphill to Snow Lake in 1 hour 20 minutes, so the four-mile figure is fairly close.

However, we hiked out from Bottleneck in 55 minutes – pausing occasionally to lift my English setter, Dickens, off a solid point on grouse. I’m estimating the mileage from the trailhead to Bottleneck at three miles.

To make our loop, we headed up to Snow Lakes on the new route that links sections of old logging road with excellent new single track.

From the lake, we scrambled up the treeless south-facing slope, through an old burn dappled with crimson huckleberry bushes, to a ridge that invites you to wander back and forth and look and look. This is the easiest route to the ridge and the summit of Bottleneck Peak.

We gaped at the snow-covered Cabinets in one direction, nearby Roman Nose Peak in another direction and hook-nosed Harrison Peak was in our face in another direction, fronting the distant Smith and Fisher peaks.

We wandered up to Bottleneck Peak and snacked while gazing precipitously down to the upper Pack River road. Across the drainage is the Selkirk Crest and waves of treeless granite peaks lapping at the sky.

We could see Harrison Lake and the nook that holds the Beehive Lakes and the Seven Sisters peaks that lead south to Chimney Rock and Mount Roothaan.

If you don’t like route-finding, bushwhacking and hopping through granite talus, retrace your route back to Snow Lake and take the easy way back to the trailhead.

If you’re up to the challenge, scramble off Bottleneck Peak, continuing on the ridge between the two lakes. Several routes lead off the mountain to Bottleneck. All are rugged. The most direct is a thin line of vegetation that angles down off the ridge to the highest reaches of big talus boulders that drop down to the lake.

Save for some moose paths, there are no trails around the lake until you get to the rough campsites at the outlet area.

From here, the new trail makes smooth sailing back out to the trailhead.