Day 15 – From potato fields to mountains

Today was a nice leisurely day once I put Utah behind me. The first three hours were on I-25 as I rode north from SLC to Twin Falls, Idaho. Many of you have driven on US interstate highways with speed limits of 70 or even 75 MPH but did you know there are sections in Utah with 80 MPH? That’s 128 KPH for us Canadians!! It was a cool morning and even into the afternoon but once through the mountains it got into the 70’s.
From Twin Falls I took the scenic route up Idaho 93 then 75 then 21 – and I do mean scenic! The first section is fairly flat as I drove through some of Idaho’s famous potato (and sugar beet) fields. They use a lot of irrigation in this area which consists of pipelines on wheels. Most pivot from a central hub giving a circular growing area (which I have seen many times in my travels) but they also have a unique style of several rows of straight lines on wheels I have not seen before. I also went through an area where the soil is mostly black lava! I’m not sure which volcano would have left it because I think Mt. St. Helen’s is still a fair distance away in Washington. The second section (route 75) goes through the foothills of the small mountain range where there are a lot of sheep and cattle roaming on everything from sagebrush to grasslands. Many of the homes and barns are made from Ponderosa Pine which is very plentiful and has a cedar-like color. Route 21 took me into the mountains and the section from Lowman to Boise was an incredibly twisty road with numerous elevation changes. I was disappointed on Day 4 when the rain prevented me from riding the famous Tail of the Dragon in NC (318 curves in 11 miles) but this was about 68 miles with many many many curves, very few guardrails and about a dozen true hairpins! I’m talking about curves where the road almost comes back on itself (I’m guessing about 210 degrees!!) I turned on my helmet cam so I’m hoping I had the camera angle right – I will process video when I get home. More than a few times I was scraping the floorboards and once I got over so far I scraped the highway peg!!! My wife would NOT have been impressed 🙂
I rolled the trip odometer over onto 10,000 km just as I pulled into my motel for the day!! That’s hard to believe and I still have about another 1200 km left in the US until I pick up Pam at SeaTac airport and we head west to Port Angeles to catch the ferry to Victoria, BC.