End of the Tunnel

I have driven three days from home, leaving cities and traffic in order to reach wide open Montana and Idaho.  My last long drive was to Fairbanks, Alaska, in mid-winter.  So much has happened since then that it feels a long time ago, a kind of tunnel that finally saw light. 

With speed limit 80mph, I made good time to the quaint and historic town of Wallace, Idaho.  After a day of cycling, I write to you about tunnels and trestles—trains and  places that stand as symbols for other things.  

Here is the entrance to the tunnel of my choosing.  It’s on the Hiawatha Bicycle Trail where trains used to rumble in 1903.  

Like the Gold Line in Pasadena, feelers reached up to an overhead wire, sucking energy.  

Once inside the mountain I saw nothing except by the light on my bicycle.  I shouted hello, but nobody answered.  Water dripped from the ceiling and trickled in ditches on both sides of former steel rails.  Can you see that small pinhole of light far off in the darkness?  Was it the end of the tunnel, or something else?  

I rode for a mile before realizing it was the end, in the way that hope sometimes precedes a thing hoped for.   

The railroad pushed through rugged mountains with about as much length in tunnels and trestles as in graded roadbed.  Now, instead of traveling in darkness with a mountain on top of me, I was flying over a canyons on a trestle.  

Like a bird, I swooped over the tops of trees and appreciated the great effort and ingenuity that built these high bridges in 1903.   

Where I not riding through tunnels or over trestles, the old railroad looks like a country road.  The difference is that it holds a steady two-percent grade no matter the terrain, where a country road is more like a roller coaster. 

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Michael Angerman has prepared a map showing all of my nightly sleeping places, as he has done for my trips many times before.  From this you can trace my route.  He updates it almost daily Thank you, Michael.  Please click here:  Michael's Map