Since Andrea and I both spent some time in the Owyhees last week (she was working and I was flying) we were both intrigued enough to venture back there for a Sunday adventure. We brought our mountain bikes, hoping to ride the same road that Andrea had travelled via ATV on earlier. We got to the road and it looked really rocky, so we decided to continue on through a small valley and into the higher parts of the mountains. We found a jeep track at about 5000 ft. on the other side and decided to try to ride our bikes up it. The road was in really bad shape and after about a mile of climbing through sand, rocks, mud and ruts, we gave up and turned back to the car. We then drove farther up the main road and turned onto what the map shows as an “unimproved” road that lead to the south over the mountains to the small ex-mining town of Silver City. We decided to see how far we could get on the road in Andrea’s Subaru.

The mountains were beautiful; amazingly green for high desert sage scrub with wildflowers everywhere. We kept driving on the road and eventually came to an SUV stopped in the middle of the road at a stream crossing. We talked to the two people with the car who turned out to be geology students from Minnesota mapping a 90 million year old fault. They said the stream was too deep to pass so we turned around to try to find another route. We ended up down another road that headed southwest and we were able to cross the stream without too much effort.

We then came upon an old mining cabin and some other out buildings before heading up a pretty steep hill with some major overhanging trees. The trees were conspiring to rip the bikes off the roof, so we put them in the back of the car and continued bouncing up the hill. At one point we decided we couldn’t go farther and had even turned the car around but then we walked up the road a bit more and decided it was probably ok to keep going.

Here’s a video of the mud hole crossing.

So we kept going up the rocky road, plotting our course with the GPS as we went. We only had the gazateer, not a 15 minute topo so it was a bit inaccurate, but worked well enough. We kept getting closer and closer to the snow (old cornices and drifts that hadn’t melted yet) and were starting to get into more alpine looking terrain around 7200 ft.

At a certain elevation, I think around 6500-7000 ft., we started seeing the Mormon crickets. They’re huge reddish orange crickets that jump all over the road. At several points, it looked like the road was moving sideways there were so many of them walking and hopping all over the place. They make a kind-of creepy sound too.

We kept creeping along the road, crossing creeks and slowly climbing up rocky, muddy inclines. At one point, we had to cross a creek that had erroded its bank so that the road dropped straight down about 8 inches or so. We watched a guy almost get his ATV stuck, then I bombed across it with the Subaru. At that point, we would have been hard pressed to turn back since we would have had to build some ramps or something to get back up that drop off. We kept on driving, encountering bad parts, then good parts of the road and lots of ATVers looking at us like we were crazy.

At one point, we saw what looked like an orange sign off of the road. We were hoping it was going to say “Silver City, this way” but it was some sort of old survey marker instead.

We finally got up to the snow and I climbed up one bank and slid down on my butt. We were starting to get a bit tired, but kept pressing on.

We finally got to a fork in the road where we had to decided whether to go around a mountain to the north or south. Some guys pulled up on ATVs and were like “how did you get back here in *that*?” I said “we drove.” They were idiots. He proceeded to tell us how he got his bronco stuck back there a couple weeks ago and there was no way we were going to make it to Silver City. I wanted to say “well, you suck at driving then” but I didn’t. Just as we were talking to those fine young men, another two more normal people came up on an ATV. One of them had his dog on his lap and they had a bunch of surveying gear. The had come from the road that led to the north and said that there was a snow drift across it and it was impassible. They were up looking for an antenna that had fallen over in the winter so they asked us what route let us get a car in, so we told them.

We took the right fork and proceeded to what became the worst part of the road. It wound down the hill through the grasslands until we were on the southeast slope, where it turned really steep and really rocky and loose. I let the car down the hill very slowly and both of us were hoping that the road would get better because we would not have made it back up the hill. We didn’t take any pictures at that point because I was afraid to stop the car on the slope. Luckily, we made it to the bottom of the hill and to a road that was a more normal forrest service type road instead of a jeep track. We continued along that road until we finally hit Silver City.

Silver City is a cool little town. I think people are mostly using it as a retreat now. There is a church, old store, hotel, school, masons hall and a bunch of houses all lining this small stream valley. There were lots of ATVers and motorcyclists back there plus a few trucks. We were the only car and we got a few strange looks.

After walking around Silver City for a while, we asked some motorcyclists what the best way out was and they pointed us in the right direction. We went over a pass and down a canyon and ended up heading back toward ID78. There were some beautiful views of both the Owyhees and the Treasure Valley (Boise, Nampa, Caldwell). We could see all the way across the valley back to the Boise Mountains at the foot of which we live.

Overall, great trip. I think a 4WD truck would have been better, but the Subaru did amazingly well. I wish we could have told those little wusses on ATVs that we made it to Silver City.

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