Trails of nostalgia | Ammi Midstokke
When the Gold Hill Trail No. 3 of Bonner County was opened in 1990, it felt like an incursion on our home turf. Our family had only moved there seven years earlier, but had been self-proclaimed explorers and discoverers since.
We found a gold miner’s cabin, his rusted stove leaning and half-buried in the detritus of nature, the walls sunken, the roof long vanished. We found the biggest cedar trees along the most remote twists and turns of the various creeks and streams. We knew where the thimble berries grew thickest, and where the reclusive elk herds could be found most mornings. We knew how to find our way to the gnarled and long-dead ponderosa at the ridge, and we still knew how to find the place when a storm toppled the tree.
We knew where the best birch copses were to be found, and where to leave our horses grazing in the wild (until they wandered to the lakefront neighbors who called to rant about the damage to their curated yards). We knew how to climb up through state land on abandoned roads and find the best lookouts over the lake, where the Purcell Trench splits the panhandle of North Idaho, Selkirks to the west, Cabinets to the east.
There were no trails other than the paths our ankles carved into the nettle patches, and there certainly were no switchbacks groomed for city folk hikers. The first time I went on Trail No. 3, I rode a mountain bike (in sandals) down the trail from the top. I had never mountain biked, and must have flipped over the handlebars of that loaned Diamond Back a half-dozen times.
The trail became training grounds for us as the years rolled on, with my dad running it (counting 51 turns), then riding it, then jumping in the lake afterward. This was how he prepared for the Lake to Forest Triathlon they hosted at Garfield Bay back then. I lived in Europe at the time, and summer visits became synonymous with runs and rides on the trail.
Once, homesick for the nature of North Idaho, I asked my dad to run it for me, and he took a camera up there and made a photo album of all the best parts: the corners with tacky soil, the birch-covered shelf that lets dappled light onto the forest floor of green leaves and tiny white flowers, the peek-a-boo glimpses at a lake view that expands with each climbing step up the mountain. For good measure, he included a photo of a drill bit and a toenail with a fresh hole in it, as Gold Hill was also the site of occasional carnage.
It has also been the place of some of my most memorable runs – the ones that feel like a transcendent zen experience, like floating down a mountain with intermittent bursts of childlike playful sprints. It is where my own child hiked at the age of six with a blue lollipop that turned the kid’s face all shades of Smurf, and marked an important outdoor learning for me: Kids will hike just about anywhere for candy.
I ran this trail countless times to cope with divorce (which we could say about most trails in the county), brought friends to the top to show them summer views of Schweitzer and the lay of the land, watched fireworks over Sandpoint, completed weighted pack tests, met bull moose, and one pair of tourists who told me I couldn’t walk by because there was a whitetail deer near the trail.
“Shhhhhhhh,” they said, as I approached, waving their hands desperately like I was a speeding car. “There’s a deer up there!”
Trail No. 3, like many of our trails, is on public lands, or swaths of wilderness that survived the great sell-off of the Grant and Cleveland administrations in the late 19th century (you know, after we annexed it all from the Natives). Much of these were protected by actions like the Roadless Rule and the Public Lands Rule, designed to limit use and protect wild spaces.
In the rolling back of these rules under the current administration, private corporations can take control of these public lands for their own enrichment while environmental protections have been reduced or eliminated. Because mining, logging, and drilling companies have been known to demonstrate responsible stewardship after plundering the lands. See: the heavy-metal contaminated water dumped into the Coeur d’Alene River and its tributaries. If you drive through Wallace you can witness firsthand the “robust economy” that mining produced.
The claim is often that these extractions will make jobs (whether for the mine workers, the cleanup crews, or the doctors treating their subsequent cancers, I’m not sure), and that the public will thus benefit from this alternate use of their public lands. Perhaps they occasionally do, in the short term. But the investors of those corporations, they aren’t the general public. They are congresspeople, senators, and business folk who live geographically distant and ethically detached from the consequences of their wealth.
Meanwhile, Trail No. 3 is busy serving its third generation in my own family, connecting us to the nature from which we come, improving our cardiac and mental health, and bringing thousands of residents and visitors in contact with the public resource of green bathing, fresh air, ecological stability, environmental education, and good memories.
These are things we could mine in perpetuity. But that would mean protecting public lands from the current scourge of greed. And that would mean engaging in the advocacy and voting necessary to punt our “drill, baby, drill” cheerleading squad back to the exploitation brain trusts from whence they came. Or to the bliss of retirement, where perhaps they, too, can enjoy the beauty of a good trail.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com