“This is the busiest you’ll ever see a trailhead in Salmon,” quipped local rider Harry Stone. It was a Saturday, and our crew of four had just ridden through the Powderhouse trailhead on our way to the Perreau trail. In addition to our group, we saw two other riders prepping their bikes. The locals I was shooting with recognized another rider’s truck, making for three total groups. Even still, we didn’t see another human being while we were actually on the singletrack — and that held true for all five of my rides in the Salmon area.
I’ve wanted to visit Salmon, Idaho, ever since Dave Lingle began uploading photos and GPX files to Singletracks in the early aughts. As I selected his fantastic photos for our Photo of the Day feature and marveled over the interconnected webs of singletrack that never seemed to end, I knew I had to get to Salmon to experience it for myself. It took me over a decade, but I finally made it happen!
As I pedaled (and pushed) along miles and miles of backcountry singletrack, I marveled at the endless array of trails that were virtually uninhabited. I wondered to myself, “is this the loneliest singletrack in the country?”
1,200 miles of singletrack and 8,200 residents
It just might be. The small town of Salmon forms the hub for a massive network of singletrack spanning Lemhi County (and beyond). Salmon is only home to 3,200 residents, and the entirety of Lemhi County is populated by about 8,200 people.
What this isolated corner of Idaho lacks in population it more than makes up for in mountain bike trails: at least 1,200 miles of trails, in fact. Granted, that number comes from Trailforks (the total of 1,613 minus ~424 miles of mapped dirt roads), and not all of those trails are great to ride. “We have a lot of trails that are mapped on Trailforks that aren’t necessarily great trails to go ride,” said Bill MacFarlene, Secretary of the Salmon Idaho Mountain Bike Association (SIMBA). “Maybe that’s not the most accurate number to put out there. But you know, that’s kind of the official number.”
Surprisingly, that 1,200-mile number continues to grow as local riders keep discovering new trails. Long-time local Dave Lingle and member of the North Fork Trails Alliance (NFTA) told me that the local riders continue to discover hidden trails that are, in fact, legal routes on the Forest Service map. The locals also continue to work hard to rehabilitate historic routes that have almost disappeared into the forest.
As we rode, Lingle mentioned a route that he was planning to investigate on an upcoming expedition. A land swap within the past year had brought a parcel of land at the bottom of a historic trail back into public hands, which could effectively open up a new route dropping from the Continental Divide down to the nearby highway thousands of feet below. Undoubtedly, an immense amount of saw work will need to be done to re-open that route… if it’s even feasible. Lingle is optimistic that horse packers and hunters may have kept part of the trail open, but they won’t know until they investigate.
In Salmon, you’ll have the trails all to yourself — but read this before you drop everything and move there.
Over a week of riding, I pedaled through high alpine meadows boasting expansive views over endless mountain ridges. We slalomed through wildflowers before dropping into the next burned zone, whizzing between the trunks of trees blackened by a recent fire.
The downhills around Salmon are fast and steep. It’s not uncommon to lose a thousand vertical feet per mile, dropping between 3,000 and 4,000 feet in one blazing-fast descent.
Interestingly, while some of the trails do have rocks, overall the singletrack in Salmon is fairly smooth and flowy. The major obstacles you’ll face are the undergrowth, downed trees, some stretches of loose rubble in the trail (just enough to make the handling squirrely), and extreme exposure coupled with an extremely narrow trail tread.
On the surface, Salmon might sound like paradise: a sea of endless singletrack utterly bereft of human beings. But before you drop everything and move here, be aware that it’s not all kittens and rainbows.
Purpose-built flow trails and bike-optimized singletrack have contributed to the mountain biking boom across the nation. These days, it seems like the most popular mountain bike destinations are full of berms, jumps, rollers, and machine-built trails. Even historic destinations are getting in on the action by adding bike-specific trails to their systems.
You won’t find a single flow trail in Salmon. “We don’t have a lot of what I’d call ‘modern’ trails,” said MacFarlene. In fact, the trails consist almost entirely of historic routes that have existed for decades, if not centuries. “We’ve adopted a lot of cow trails, “said MacFarlene. While locals like MacFarlene and Lingle spend countless hours working to make those cow trails, moto trails, and historic routes fun to ride on a mountain bike, these are not easy-to-digest mountain bike experiences.
Most rides in Salmon begin by climbing thousands of feet up a steep forest road or rugged singletrack. It’s not uncommon for locals to log over 5,000 of vert in a ride that’s less than 30 miles long. While some of the trails can be shuttled using the network of forest service roads, there aren’t any commercial shuttles, so you’ll have to coordinate your own logistics with rugged pickups capable of tackling the narrow, sometimes rough mountain roads.
Even if you get a shuttle bump to the “top,” most of the time, you’ll still have to do some hike-a-biking before it’s time to go downhill. The saying, “If you ain’t hiking, you ain’t biking,” has never been more true than it is in Salmon. As we pushed our whips to the top of a mountain on the Continental Divide, Lingle told me about a local friend who produced a mountain biking calendar with images from Salmon — solely featuring the region’s grueling hike-a-bikes.
Due to the difficulty required to ride most of the trails in the region, the mountain biking community in Salmon is small and hardy. It seems like the riders here are all gritty men and women who are comfortable spending 6-8 hours deep in the mountains, all by themselves.
Leave your hip packs at home — big hydration packs are required for these brutal backcountry epics, in part because locals are always packing a saw.
Keeping Salmon’s trails open is a job that never ends.
As I’ve pedaled (and pushed) my mountain bike on remote singletrack all around the world, I’ve observed that there’s a careful balance that needs to be struck between not having enough traffic to keep singletrack open, and having so much traffic that the trail gets negatively impacted by the passage of thousands of tires. Neither end of the spectrum is good. You need to have a critical mass of trail users to keep trails open and rideable, and if you don’t, your trails will quickly be reclaimed by the forest.
The trails in Salmon are constantly at risk of disappearing back into the forest. If it wasn’t for Salmon’s dedicated contingent of volunteers, most of these trails wouldn’t exist anymore. To keep the singletrack rideable, locals spend hundreds of hours sawing downed trees and clearing trail every single season.
Trees are constantly falling across the singletrack — whether they’re killed by a recent fire, killed by pine beetles, or even healthy trees knocked down by vicious storms, the deadfall is never ending. Lingle has been sawing trees on these trails for over 20 years and never rides without a handsaw in his pack. On dedicated saw missions, he hauls a chainsaw on a Salsa Timberjack hardtail (no, not an e-bike) equipped with a rack specially designed for saw hauling. Lingle clocks about 120 hours of trail clearing every year, with other members of the NFTA clocking about 70 hours each. MacFarlene and SIMBA also spend countless hours cutting trees, as do other local riders who might not be affiliated with either organization.
Many (but not all) of the trails are shared with motorcycles, and in recent years, motorized trail crews have begun clearing the moto-legal trails. “When you have a motorized recreational vehicle, you have to get a license with the state,” said Lingle. “In Idaho, they use that permit money to hire trail crews for the motorized trails. So there’s three [or] four different crews, they call them the ‘Trail Rangers.’ Those guys cruise around on motorcycles, and they focus on motorized trails. Since that started, we are cutting a little less, maybe a third as much.”
Because the local mountain bikers don’t have to clear as many motorized trails anymore, it might seem like their job has gotten easier. The problem is that there are so many trails to clear deadfall on that the less-ridden trails might not get cleared every single season. Sometimes, the only time that Lingle will ride a trail in a given year is when he’s on a saw mission. If he gets to saw a high-mountain trail and then ride that same trail two or three more times that season, it’s a relative rarity.
On our rides together, I helped Lingle clear several trees on trails that had already been “opened” for the year. The trees just keep falling.
New trail development is an uphill battle.
Lingle and SIMBA were pivotal in legalizing many trails in the region over the years — most notably the Discovery Hill trails, which now serve as Salmon’s in-town trail system. This low, arid trail network opens early in the season — generally in March or April — and stays open into the early winter, providing Salmon with a lengthy riding season for this northern latitude. During the shoulder season, riders flock from all over Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming to ride dry singletrack in Salmon.
Due to changes in the rec managers at the Forest Service and BLM, new trail development has been difficult in recent years. “There hasn’t been a whole lot of trail development, like, ‘here we go, we’re gonna go and develop a network of mountain bike trails in this location, and it’s gonna be awesome,'” said MacFarlene.
Despite the challenging climate, SIMBA is currently working on a trail proposal in the Twelvemile area. Twelvemile is one of the closest trail systems to the town of Salmon, but most of the trails are high in the mountains, requiring a drive (or ride) 9 miles up a rough forest road with about 2,500 feet of climbing. While one epic ride — Lime Creek — drops out of the Twelvemile area, it’s not really loopable with the road climb. To solve this access problem, SIMBA is working to get approval to build a climbing trail that will allow riders to pedal up to this gem of a trail system.
Parting thoughts
A modern mountain bike destination with curated routes and accessible trailheads, Salmon is not. If you’re looking for sculpted berms and progressive jump lines, you won’t find them here. But if you’re willing to earn your turns, immerse yourself in the wilderness, and aren’t afraid to stare down a bear or a moose, Salmon will reward you with towering mountain ridges and endless miles of serpentine singletrack.
“I hope you take away from this experience that you’ve just scratched the surface,” said Lingle. Despite five days of hard riding, I didn’t even get to sample all the different zones available in Salmon. As I learned about all of the adventures on offer in this incredible corner of Idaho — from mountain biking the singletrack to floating the iconic river, hiking to hot springs, and more — I found myself wishing I could spend all summer bumming around the mountains, swimming in the river, and cutting trees in the forest.
Yes, the riding in Salmon is tough. But damn, is it rewarding!
Looking for trail recommendations? Look no further: “Rideaho: 5 of the best MTB trail systems near Salmon, Idaho“
