The Northwest Cycling Adventures of Peter and Chris: Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes (Part III)

Ride #7

November 16th, 2014

Cataldo, ID to Wallace, ID and back

45.5 miles

699 ft ascent/descent

Sunny, 20-27 degrees

As I write this four hours after finishing Part III of our Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes adventure, my toes are still defrosting under a heated blanket. The hand-warmers we brought to put in our shoes had expired some time ago, and they didn't really work. Plus, both of us neglected to bring appropriate shoes. So as we biked back from Wallace in the bitter 22 degree weather, the wind just about froze our toes off. It was quite painful for the last 20 miles... We'll never make that mistake again! But other than that, this ride went very nicely and at the end, though we were tired of the cold, both of us were surprisingly not too worn out from the ride. We were even able to sprint the last half mile!

Peter and I had bought balaclavas at REI a couple days prior, and thank God we did. Twenty degrees not including windchill can be quite brisk in the shade of all the mountains surrounding most of this part of the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes. The ride itself was probably the least pretty we've done so far. Following the interstate nearly the whole way between Cataldo and Wallace, it passes through a couple tiny towns famous for smelters and car dealerships before arriving at the very cool and definite highlight of the ride: Wallace.

I'd always seen it from the interstate and wanted to stop there because of how cool it looked. It's an old mining town with a lot of history, preserved buildings and fantastic restaurants. We ended up at a place called "The Smokehouse," where we had a bison burger and a jalapeño pulled pork sandwich along with some heavenly mac & cheese, jumbalaya and red beans and rice. It was hard to pry ourselves away from the warm, delicious comfort of that restaurant and subject ourselves to another 23 miles in the cold, but we finally managed after finishing our hot buttered rum.

On the way back, we set a new record for ourselves by completing the entire length without stopping. It took an us hour and forty minutes, which we declared was sufficiently badass as we warmed our frozen toes in the car.