Tunnels, Trestles, and Tracks

St. Regis, Montana, is a lovely little two-day stopover that we made specifically to ride the Hiawatha Rail-Trail bike path. It’s a short piece of the old “Milwaukee Road”—the transcontinental railroad from Chicago to Tacoma that took freight, GIs, and passengers across the country for 71 years. The railroad’s owners—Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railway—began the western extension to Tacoma in 1905 and opened it about four years later. The difficulty of the Bitterroot Mountain terrain, the harshness of its winters, and the need to tunnel through mountains and cross over gorges made this extension the most difficult and expensive portion of the line to build. Estimated at $45 million, it topped out at $234 million.

The biking trail is 15 miles each way, set between the top of St Paul Pass in Montana and Pearson, Idaho, to the west. With a super gentle 1.7% grade (trains had to run this route, after all) it offers easy riding even up hill, which makes it popular and doable for families, seniors, and day-bikers like us. We saw many children on bikes, several parents towing baby-carts, and even a triple-tandem of a dad and his two school-age daughters. (Guess who pulled most of the weight despite his younger daughter’s constant list to the left?) 

The trail is operated and maintained by Idaho’s Lookout Ski Pass Area and manned by a bunch of twenty-somethings who convene under tents at either end. They take your ten bucks for a day-use tag, wrap it around your bike’s brake cable, rent helmets (they’re mandatory), verify that you’ve got a bike headlight (also mandatory), and send you on your way to tackle miles of groomed gravel, seven towering trestles, and ten echoing tunnels. 

We started on the Montana side at the top of St Paul Pass. The St Paul Pass Tunnel, the trail’s longest at a whopping 1.7 miles long, is waiting beyond this signpost. It is a very dark, very cold, very drippy entrance into Idaho, and an experience we must repeat on the way back. More on that later.

The route takes its name from the railroad’s “Olympian Hiawatha” passenger train, a streamlined darling that debuted in 1947. The train was famous for its luxurious amenities, futuristic styling (like something out of Disney’s Tomorrowland in the 1960s), and a two-story glassed-in “solarium” for all-around views of our country’s spectacular scenery.

The line underwent recurring spates of bankruptcies, recoveries, and competitive troubles and was ultimately decommissioned for passengers in 1961 and for freight in 1980. Idahoans converted part of it to this great bike trail in the early 1990s. The bottom map in this picture shows the long, hairpin part of the trail that comprises the bike path.

It took us half an hour just to head out, there were so many interesting historical placards to read at the start. We found stories of the devastating multi-million acre forest fire of 1910 that wiped out almost all the towns near the tracks (many residents were saved by hiding in the tunnels while fire raged above and all around them). We read about the copper mining and white pine lumber industries that sprang up to use the region’s new commerce transit; about the heroic making of the St Paul Pass Tunnel; and about the rough-and-tumble, valley-based construction camps that are now buried under I-90. And that was only the beginning set of reader boards!

At nearly two miles, the St Paul Pass Tunnel is the longest, coldest, and darkest among the ten on the trail. There is no lighting in any of them, so riders must supply their own. This is what it would have looked like with the lights off. Like most people, we had taped flashlights to our handlebars, but they were as feeble as a Bic lighter in a sports arena in a blackout—especially since, at mid-morning, we happened to be the only ones in the tunnel. The tunnel is only wide enough for a single train, and there are short drop-offs into shallow water channels on either side against the walls. Riders are instructed to stay at the center of the trail, which I found more difficult than I expected in a world of black. All I could see was the next ten feet of brown, graveled, occasionally puddled ground in front of me; the sporadic red flash of Ken’s bike reflector from my makeshift headlight; and a pale gray cloud of illumination from Ken’s flashlight some fifteen yards ahead. Everything else was blackness. Without a peripheral frame of reference, I had the sensation of being constantly off balance and unable to steer a straight line. I was grateful there was no opposing traffic to navigate! It seemed to take forever to get through those 1.7 miles of ice-cold air, enclosing darkness, and the eerie reverberation of our bike wheels shushing along packed wet earth.

Breaking into daylight was welcome indeed, especially for the surprise waterfall that greeted us. We quickly found a patch of sunshine and thawed out for a good ten minutes before moving on.

What we thought would be a 2-1/2 hour jaunt turned into about five hours by the time we stopped at every one of the interesting reader boards on the way down. This one describes life in the temporary construction camps, which was very much like a 49er’s miner’s settlement, with drinking, dancing, brawling, gambling, wenching, and the lot.

Into another tunnel. This one is maybe a quarter mile long. Some you can see straight through, and others are too winding or long to see the end of. One of them was damaged in a landslide years ago after the railroad and closed; it’s one of the few places where the trail was rerouted from what the original trains used.

As along many railroad lines through America, the views in the Bitterroot Mountains are spectacular.

The local wildlife seemed accustomed to people. This young buck dropped by for some browsing at the same time we took a break.

A doe followed a few minutes later and wandered within twenty feet of Ken at a nearby overlook.

In the distance, a preview of one of the seven trestles we will cross high above the region’s gorges and rivers. In the foreground, a squirrel photo-bombs the pic. (At most signage stops, at least five of these little beggars scampered around our feet and bike tires looking for handouts or dropped snack crumbs.)

Ken crosses one of the trestles. We still hadn’t come upon too many people yet.

We’re just past the turn of the hairpin I pointed out earlier on the map pic. A largish town and railroad terminal for logging used to be where I’m standing. Long, long gone.

View from another trestle.

We’ve finally come upon the bulk of the early morning crowds…and more reader boards. Early in its history, this portion of railroad had the longest stretch of electrified track in the U.S. (440 miles). It was needed during winters, when the mountain air got so cold that a train’s boilers wouldn’t start. To keep things moving, the railroad installed electric lines. Sort of like the San Francisco trolley gone colossal and rural. This board explains how the electric trains were constructed and how they worked.

Some of the crossbeams that once carried the electric lines above the tracks.

Fifteen miles later, we took a break at the bottom of road. There’s a parking lot for people starting the trail from this Idaho end, plus bathrooms, free water from coolers, and a shuttle bus for those who want to pay for a ride back up.

A wind-shredded butterfly casts bigger than life shadows.

Just as we started back up, we met a young couple from Spokane and joined them on the first half of their ride…they would get to coast all the way back! Here we’re taking a break at the same viewpoint where we met the deer on the way down. She is a professional circus acrobat and he is a chiropractor—an appropriate combination, we thought. Having company made the return trip seem to go really fast, even though it was uphill. Happily, the grade was slight enough that we could pedal and talk at the same time. The return trip was a lot more crowded, though.

While Ken and our new friends went to the overlook, I was enamored by the squirrels. This one had found a leftover peanut butter and jelly sandwich (strawberry, I suspect) and was sharing it with a couple dozen buzzing bees.

 

Past 2:00, and we’re finally back at the top and ready for a long-delayed lunch. The final attraction—a second pass through that dark, cold, 1.7-mile tunnel—wasn’t any warmer at this time of day, just wetter and more weirdly lit by a dozen or more additional riders. Their presence made for a different kind of creepiness, with my own and other people’s shadows bobbing, wavering, and stretching out ahead of me, and their chatter and labored breathing bouncing from the damp walls. Our fender-less back wheels also spit up a nice stream of muddy water onto our butts and backs. By the end of the ride, we looked like a pair of those brown-striped squirrels we’d left behind on the trail.