Big Trip 08 – Idaho

This was the third place we stayed on our BigTrip.

When we were planning for the trip, we wanted to visit a lot of lesser known resorts, and places that were hard to get to from the UK without changing planes etc. We knew we wanted to go to Oregon, and to Montana, and so Idaho seemed like a good place to visit that was between the two.

The Red Express dropped us back at Spokane airport, and we collected our car for the next 17 days.

We’d decided to visit Silver Mountain – I’m not sure why Silver won out over Schweitzer but it did. We found ourselves some lovely, lovely lodging at the Morning Star lodge and had treated ourselves to a larger room so that we could have some domestic extras – like a washing machine and a fully equipped kitchen.
Richard in the corridor of the Morning Star Lodge

Silver Mountain isn’t really a destination resort – but it kept us busy for a couple of days. The snow could have been better, but it would have been hard to have had much more of the mountain to ourselves, the biggest lift queue saw us waiting for 10 people to load ahead of us – some of the lifts are a bit old but with the level of traffic it wasn’t a problem. There is a 20 minute or so gondola ride to get from Kellogg to Silver mountain but this was quick and new and caused us no issues.

The top of Chair 4

Whilst we were in Idaho, it was a total lunar eclipse, so we stood outside in the freezing cold to watch some of it, before heading off to nearby Noah’s canteen to warm up again.
Lunar eclipse

Would I visit again? Well I’d pop in for a couple of days on the way to somewhere else again.

As we left Idaho to head to Montana we decided, thanks to an OnTheSnow review I’d read, to pop into Lookout Pass – a small mountain on the border between Idaho and Montana. We spent a few hours exploring and playing in amongst trees before leaving Idaho behind us and moving on to Montana.

Lookout Pass: On the border of Montana and Idaho

From my sportstracker log in Idaho we did:

  • 20th Feb – Silver Mountain – 15 miles
  • 21st Feb – Silver Mountain – 26.49 miles
  • 22nd Feb – Lookout Pass – 19.26 miles

A total for Idaho of 60.75 miles.

Author: jane

Software Developer, Photographer and Snowboarder