Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes - Kellogg to Shont TH and Kellogg to Enaville - 8/3/17

Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes - Kellogg to Shont TH and Kellogg to Enaville - 8/3/17

Picking up the pieces of the trail, we drove all the way back to Kellogg, Idaho to complete the section back up to the Shont Trailhead and back down to Kellogg to ride down to Enaville to close the loop on this section of the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes.

Kellogg is the town that was “founded by a jackass and inhabited by his descendants” … as legend has it, on the morning of September 4, 1885, Noah Kellogg was a prospector looking for silver when his jackass became lost and was located neared a seam of galena (which frequently co-occurs with silver) and the town of Kellogg was born as a silver mining town in the Silver Valley, the site of the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mines… also mining lead and zinc (99.9% pure).  The Bunker Hill Mine closed in 1981.  The name alone of the nearby town of Smelterville gives one the flavor of life in the Silver Valley.

In May, 1972, the Sunshine Mine of Kellogg was the site of one of the worst U.S. mining accidents, in which 91 miners died due to carbon monoxide poisoning.  As a result, every miner in the U.S. now carries a “self-rescuer” (a breathing device made with hopcalite giving the miner a chance to avoid death due to carbon dioxide).

Now Kellogg is a town trying to revive into a historic mining town with skiing, including a long (3.1
 miles) gondola ride, the world’s longest single-cabin gondola.  The New York Times Travel Section had featured Kellogg as an up and coming tourist location in northern Idaho with the Silver Mountain Ski Resort.  Many of the historic buildings have been preserved dating from the late 1890s and the early 1900s.  The town is clearly investing in beautification as represented by the planning around the historic buildings and the flowers lining the main historic section, but it is small, approximately 2400 people.  The Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes runs through the town and has attracted summer tourists with the bike trail, gondola ride and a water park … just not sure that is enough.

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant … the locals immediately recognized that we were tourists (the padded biking shorts must have given me away).  We enjoyed lunch and were told that the next week that the town would be hopping with the Kellogg HS Reunion … signs all over town welcomed home the alumni of the Kellogg High School Wildcats.  We definitely like Wildcats …

One might wonder at my preoccupation with mining … my maternal grandfather was a Finnish-American copper miner from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan … I’ve long been intrigued by the hard work of these immigrants who worked in extremely dangerous underground mines controlled by mining companies that kept many of the miners in a form of indentured servitude requiring the use of company stores and blocking efforts at unionization for workers’ rights, including worker safety.  Kellogg also has a difficult history between unions and the mining companies.

The ride along the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes was a bit less magical on this section which runs along the Coeur d'Alenes River, but also runs right next to I-90 … so, the soundtrack of the ride was the sound of trucks and other traffic running through the Silver Valley along I-90 leaving a deafening cloud of sound.  We opted to not take the gondola ride because of the gray haze that coated the mountains from the smoke of the various fires … we’d likely have gotten to the top and not been able to see a thing …

Note to self:  Rail trails near major highways are to be avoided …