Jefferson
Active member
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2012
- Messages
- 196
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 28
- Location
- Southwest Missouri
- Country
- United States
John Muir famously said, “the mountains are calling and I must go.” All my life, I have associated that saying with the foggy, deciduous, gently-sloped, salamander-filled Appalachians. While those mountains are still by far my favorite, the more time I have spent in the West, where my travels and herp life list have the most gaps, the more I understand Muir’s love of the Rockies, Cascades, and Coast Ranges, and why America’s flagship national parks are those of the Wild West.
This post is about herps, about travels with my wife, and about overcoming adversity, but it’s also about an unspeakably, almost terrifyingly gorgeous landscape: the Northern Rockies of Western Montana and Northern Idaho.
Until this trip, my only encounter with the Rocky Mountains had been Yellowstone (2017), which was stunning for an Easterner getting his first taste. Since then, I have traversed the Cascades and Coast Range several times for salamanders, but I was excited that Chloe and I would get to see Glacier National Park for months ahead of time, praying against one of the notorious early-season snows that could ruin a late September trip from both a hiking and herping standpoint in those northern climes. By mid-August, it was clear I should be hoping not for warmer conditions than usual, but a rapid cool-off and some rain, especially since all the main targets were salamanders—the region was in a horrendous drought with temperatures regularly cracking 90 unusually late in the season everywhere but the highest elevations.
Luckily, the week before our trip finally brought some rain and at least a little heat relief to the Idaho Panhandle. After a long wait, the time was finally at hand after a meeting concluded on Tuesday, and Chloe and I trekked north to Kansas City to catch our flight to Spokane. On the flight, we somehow got on cosmetology, which I learned for the first time in my life has nothing at all to do with the stars….
After a short layover in Denver, we landed in Spokane at around 10pm, and strode to the rental car counter, where we had a reservation. The gentleman at the front let us know “we don’t have any cars right now,” despite our reservation, which set off an hour of panic and ultimately coughing up an extra $100 to rent a car for the next 24 hours from a different company. This episode gave “remember the Alamo” a whole new meaning that has nothing to do with the Texas legend.
We arrived at our Airbnb in Coeur d’Alene, finally, in a different rental car past midnight, exhausted, to find that despite the good location, it smelled heavily like cats. But there comes a point of exhaustion when such things no longer matter, and we were at it.
The next morning, we started herping early in the morning just barely back into Washington. Temperatures were still mild and the humidity was high as we hiked through forebodingly dry pine forest to a large vernal pool, which was now dry but still moist with dew and thick with vegetation amid the rocks. Much to my surprise, it only took three rocks to find our quarry, and the next rock after that had seven yearlings under it as well. Given the hot and dry conditions near Spokane the preceding week, we got lucky to find this aggregation of recently transformed salamanders.
After a brief Walmart stop, we crossed back into Idaho and drove around the picturesque Coeur d’Alene lake (passing multiple deer on interstate off-ramp roads in broad daylight!) to a spot that looked infinitely more like Tennessee or Kentucky than where we had just been. It was a clear, babbling mountain stream with mossy rocks on its fringe, huge conifers blotting out the sun, and seeps flowing into the main stream every so often, meandering their way across the pine needle-strewn forest floor. The shaded areas were a refreshing mid-50s chilly. For an eastern herper like me, it screamed “you are about to flip Desmogs,” but, of course, the closest ones were a thousand miles away in Oklahoma. After one unsuccessful spot, a narrow side seep where Chloe chanted “we want to see the salamanders, we don’t want to see any bears” (to make noise for the bears) produced two small juvenile Coeur d’Alene Salamanders and then a good-sized adult within five minutes or so.
Getting two of our four salamander targets in the first three hours of herping came as something of a shock, and we headed back toward the Airbnb to relax, although Alamo called and said our original rental car was ready, so we instead exchanged cars before napping for a couple hours. Mid-afternoon, we headed east toward Montana to a series of spots in the St. Joe National Forest, probably the most remote stop of the trip. As we drove east, the mountains got taller and we finally played our trip playlist (heavy on Hank Williams Jr.’s many songs about or inspired by his time in Montana). The mountains, though gorgeous and imposing, were but a hint of what we would see in Montana.
At the first trickling stream through the massive pines, it only took 10 or so good rocks before I flipped the 3rd salamander lifer of the trip, and it was a huge larvae. Incidentally, it was also my 500th lifetime worldwide herp (7 came from Belize in March on our honeymoon, the rest from the United States). It reminded me greatly of the Cope’s Giant Salamanders on the Olympic Peninsula, which are also often neotenic.
We flipped more on land in search of an Eastern Long-toed or an adult/transformed Idaho Giant, but found nothing by the time we got hungry for dinner and the sun began setting. In the old mining town of Wallace, which is built like West Virginia towns (houses old, standardized, and close together—you can tell it used to be a “company town”), we walked around the downtown, window-shopped at stores selling Vegas-style wares but with a mountain twist (slightly vulgar T-shirts and touristy trinkets) and had some overpriced but tasty Italian by the time nightfall set in.
About 30 minutes after sunset, we hit the same stream where we had found the Idaho Giant a few hours before and shined this Rocky Mountain Tailed Frog adult sitting on a log atop a mini cascade within a few minutes. Although he jumped down into a crevice beneath the waterfall as soon as I approached to get closer video and catch him, I did get a respectable still picture from a distance:
What prehistoric-looking frogs, and how cool that they are right here in the US! I had looked for their coastal cousins a few times, but this was my first Tailed Frog of either subspecies. It was the perfect way to end a wildly successful first day.
This left me in an unfamiliar position: nothing left to see for the next few days (only Eastern Long-toed and Columbia Spotted Frog remained, and one was only in Montana, the other nearly certain on the last day of the trip near Moscow). Instead of doubling down on the herping, I decided that Chloe puts up with plenty without complaint on herping trips and that we should relax for the next two days, and just hike a few places that might have Rubber Boas and otherwise do what she wanted. On a random hike at Cougar Bay, we turned up a huge quantity of Wandering Gartersnakes and some great views (and heard a moose emerging from the water a hundred yards ahead of us, at which we turned around!) and returned to the Airbnb to watch Liar Liar and listen to Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up routine about Canada. A
The next day was extremely slow-paced, as we slept in and then plotted our early dinner just across the border two hours away in Canada. I put together a playlist heavy on Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, and Anne Murray for the occasion and looked up videos and stories of British Columbia/Alberta grizzly attacks (which was inadvisable!). We took off north after lunch, passing through Sandpoint and then Bonners Ferry, where the mountains surrounding us closed in. After crossing the border (where, disappointingly, we did not get our passports stamped by the border crossing agent), we hiked for probably 100 yards at Creston Valley Wildlife Area (there had been a recent grizzly attack and a sign at the trailhead warning that every conceivable dangerous mammal in North America could be encountered there, but we wanted to say that we had hiked in Canada) and then went to the Bay Leaf Indian Restaurant in Creston. If you are ever in that neck of the woods, I highly recommend the Lamb Korma.
The next day, we transitioned east into Montana. It was Glacier Day! As we drove back past our Idaho Giant spot on I-90, the temperatures dropped into the 30s, and we crossed into Montana with the mercury at a startlingly low 32 degrees in the early morning. Along a river near St. Regis, we saw an Elk from the interstate, although we came up empty on “’Murica Eagles,” which Chloe has still never seen! Driving from Coeur d’Alene to Glacier, one gets the feeling that the entire world is nothing but mountains and pine trees, with only the dry plains near the aptly named town of Plains and the valley south of Kalispell as respite from repeated breathtaking vistas.
In a small city park outside of Glacier, the thermometer read a more comfortable 53 degrees by the time we started herping just past 10am Montana time in a mix of marshy woods and yellow and paper birches, which reminded me mightily of my early childhood in Northern Michigan. After about a half hour of flipping unsuccessfully, it dawned on us that despite the dry conditions, the soil under birch logs was holding more moisture than under pine and other types of wood. Flipping only birch logs, we found our target within 15 minutes, a gorgeous Eastern Long-toed Salamander with the bold, unbroken, nearly fluorescent stripe characteristic of Montana specimens.
From there, we climbed up to the foot of the mountains of Glacier and entered the park, with the good fortune that we had accidentally made our reservation for fee-free day. To describe the overwhelming awe that visiting Glacier for the first time inspires in nigh impossible, but those of you who have been there know exactly what I mean: that place is breathtaking, and the drive from Apgar up to Logan Pass feels like passing between worlds, one forested and verdant, the other unforgiving, barren, tundra-like. I will include some scenery shots here, as well as one of a mountain goat that was taken from well over a mile away and then zoomed in as far as possible—the goat looked like a speck on the ridge with the naked eye!
On the way down from the mountain, we stopped at one of the many purple-logoed stands advertising Huckleberry ice cream and milk shakes. The mascot, fittingly, was a bear. The employees were unenthusiastic and clearly tired of tourists (who can blame them?), but the shakes themselves were great. On the drive to Missoula, on which we checked college football scores and looked back at pictures from the trip, we saw the following sign for an establishment: “Cold Beer-Casino-Kid-Friendly.” What?? The sunset and twilight behind the Bitterroot Range just north of Missoula was a sight to see, second only to desert sunsets in Arizona/New Mexico. That night, the Airbnb host had someone over (and taking our parking spot) and I had to hold back branches to get our car in the extreme left of the driveway. I stupidly did not see my right foot was in the track of the back tire. Miraculously, because I was standing on mulch, it only got the first two inches of my foot, and Chloe drove over it quickly, I suffered no injury from having my foot run over by a car!! That one goes in the “I’m so tough that” category….
The next day, we drove back into Idaho on US 12 along the Lochsa River after getting a morning hike in Missoula that resulted in no herps but a cool view of the river bisecting the park and a spate of well-groomed and well-mannered dogs that the other hikers were generally okay with strangers petting. That’s a win.
The Lochsa River is one of the most inviting, picturesque rivers in North America. At some points, it’s fifty yards across but consistently only 2-3 feet deep and crystal clear (at least during drought), and fly fishermen lined its banks and those of the Clearwater River into which it merges for over 100 miles. At a campground stop along the river, we saw several juvenile Columbia Spotted Frogs, and promptly got a big adult in a pond just off the river.
After spending an unexpected 15 minutes with a chatty gas station owner in rural Nez Perce County somewhere (he also sold guns at his gas station, and his son was coming back from a Pronghorn hunt in Southern Idaho), we hit another spot near our Airbnb for Columbia Spotted Frogs and scored these lighter-colored individuals, one of which Chloe caught (her first herp capture!).
A pretty hike in Washington at a county park turned up no Rubber Boas (although a hiker we passed had seen one there the previous week the day after a rain) largely due to the dry conditions. The rocks I flipped were kicking up dust, and haze from Canadian wildfires meant seeing more than 15-20 miles even from ridges was difficult. Hitting our camper Airbnb, we binge-watched “Indian Matchmaker,” which I liked more than I thought I would, to my wife’s surprise and delight. Not a bad day. The only possible decent lifer left was Rubber Boa, and I had little faith we’d see one under the conditions.
Nonetheless, we gave it a shot on our last day, but saw nothing except more good views, and a large moose (our first) that morning in the University of Idaho’s botanical gardens in downtown Moscow.
The local A&W was radically overpriced compared to what I remember from Michigan ones, although the cheese curds were still respectable. Some more Indian Matchmaker, and it was time to head home. It was a wonderful journey to the Northern Rockies, a place with low herp biodiversity, but where everything for me was a lifer. I wish that this under-herped section of America got more attention, because trips there can be both productive and relaxing at the same time given how easy many of the animals are to locate (I can only imagine how productive we would have been if there had not been a drought!). Happy herping!
This post is about herps, about travels with my wife, and about overcoming adversity, but it’s also about an unspeakably, almost terrifyingly gorgeous landscape: the Northern Rockies of Western Montana and Northern Idaho.
Until this trip, my only encounter with the Rocky Mountains had been Yellowstone (2017), which was stunning for an Easterner getting his first taste. Since then, I have traversed the Cascades and Coast Range several times for salamanders, but I was excited that Chloe and I would get to see Glacier National Park for months ahead of time, praying against one of the notorious early-season snows that could ruin a late September trip from both a hiking and herping standpoint in those northern climes. By mid-August, it was clear I should be hoping not for warmer conditions than usual, but a rapid cool-off and some rain, especially since all the main targets were salamanders—the region was in a horrendous drought with temperatures regularly cracking 90 unusually late in the season everywhere but the highest elevations.
Luckily, the week before our trip finally brought some rain and at least a little heat relief to the Idaho Panhandle. After a long wait, the time was finally at hand after a meeting concluded on Tuesday, and Chloe and I trekked north to Kansas City to catch our flight to Spokane. On the flight, we somehow got on cosmetology, which I learned for the first time in my life has nothing at all to do with the stars….
After a short layover in Denver, we landed in Spokane at around 10pm, and strode to the rental car counter, where we had a reservation. The gentleman at the front let us know “we don’t have any cars right now,” despite our reservation, which set off an hour of panic and ultimately coughing up an extra $100 to rent a car for the next 24 hours from a different company. This episode gave “remember the Alamo” a whole new meaning that has nothing to do with the Texas legend.
We arrived at our Airbnb in Coeur d’Alene, finally, in a different rental car past midnight, exhausted, to find that despite the good location, it smelled heavily like cats. But there comes a point of exhaustion when such things no longer matter, and we were at it.
The next morning, we started herping early in the morning just barely back into Washington. Temperatures were still mild and the humidity was high as we hiked through forebodingly dry pine forest to a large vernal pool, which was now dry but still moist with dew and thick with vegetation amid the rocks. Much to my surprise, it only took three rocks to find our quarry, and the next rock after that had seven yearlings under it as well. Given the hot and dry conditions near Spokane the preceding week, we got lucky to find this aggregation of recently transformed salamanders.
After a brief Walmart stop, we crossed back into Idaho and drove around the picturesque Coeur d’Alene lake (passing multiple deer on interstate off-ramp roads in broad daylight!) to a spot that looked infinitely more like Tennessee or Kentucky than where we had just been. It was a clear, babbling mountain stream with mossy rocks on its fringe, huge conifers blotting out the sun, and seeps flowing into the main stream every so often, meandering their way across the pine needle-strewn forest floor. The shaded areas were a refreshing mid-50s chilly. For an eastern herper like me, it screamed “you are about to flip Desmogs,” but, of course, the closest ones were a thousand miles away in Oklahoma. After one unsuccessful spot, a narrow side seep where Chloe chanted “we want to see the salamanders, we don’t want to see any bears” (to make noise for the bears) produced two small juvenile Coeur d’Alene Salamanders and then a good-sized adult within five minutes or so.
Getting two of our four salamander targets in the first three hours of herping came as something of a shock, and we headed back toward the Airbnb to relax, although Alamo called and said our original rental car was ready, so we instead exchanged cars before napping for a couple hours. Mid-afternoon, we headed east toward Montana to a series of spots in the St. Joe National Forest, probably the most remote stop of the trip. As we drove east, the mountains got taller and we finally played our trip playlist (heavy on Hank Williams Jr.’s many songs about or inspired by his time in Montana). The mountains, though gorgeous and imposing, were but a hint of what we would see in Montana.
At the first trickling stream through the massive pines, it only took 10 or so good rocks before I flipped the 3rd salamander lifer of the trip, and it was a huge larvae. Incidentally, it was also my 500th lifetime worldwide herp (7 came from Belize in March on our honeymoon, the rest from the United States). It reminded me greatly of the Cope’s Giant Salamanders on the Olympic Peninsula, which are also often neotenic.
We flipped more on land in search of an Eastern Long-toed or an adult/transformed Idaho Giant, but found nothing by the time we got hungry for dinner and the sun began setting. In the old mining town of Wallace, which is built like West Virginia towns (houses old, standardized, and close together—you can tell it used to be a “company town”), we walked around the downtown, window-shopped at stores selling Vegas-style wares but with a mountain twist (slightly vulgar T-shirts and touristy trinkets) and had some overpriced but tasty Italian by the time nightfall set in.
About 30 minutes after sunset, we hit the same stream where we had found the Idaho Giant a few hours before and shined this Rocky Mountain Tailed Frog adult sitting on a log atop a mini cascade within a few minutes. Although he jumped down into a crevice beneath the waterfall as soon as I approached to get closer video and catch him, I did get a respectable still picture from a distance:
What prehistoric-looking frogs, and how cool that they are right here in the US! I had looked for their coastal cousins a few times, but this was my first Tailed Frog of either subspecies. It was the perfect way to end a wildly successful first day.
This left me in an unfamiliar position: nothing left to see for the next few days (only Eastern Long-toed and Columbia Spotted Frog remained, and one was only in Montana, the other nearly certain on the last day of the trip near Moscow). Instead of doubling down on the herping, I decided that Chloe puts up with plenty without complaint on herping trips and that we should relax for the next two days, and just hike a few places that might have Rubber Boas and otherwise do what she wanted. On a random hike at Cougar Bay, we turned up a huge quantity of Wandering Gartersnakes and some great views (and heard a moose emerging from the water a hundred yards ahead of us, at which we turned around!) and returned to the Airbnb to watch Liar Liar and listen to Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up routine about Canada. A
The next day was extremely slow-paced, as we slept in and then plotted our early dinner just across the border two hours away in Canada. I put together a playlist heavy on Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, and Anne Murray for the occasion and looked up videos and stories of British Columbia/Alberta grizzly attacks (which was inadvisable!). We took off north after lunch, passing through Sandpoint and then Bonners Ferry, where the mountains surrounding us closed in. After crossing the border (where, disappointingly, we did not get our passports stamped by the border crossing agent), we hiked for probably 100 yards at Creston Valley Wildlife Area (there had been a recent grizzly attack and a sign at the trailhead warning that every conceivable dangerous mammal in North America could be encountered there, but we wanted to say that we had hiked in Canada) and then went to the Bay Leaf Indian Restaurant in Creston. If you are ever in that neck of the woods, I highly recommend the Lamb Korma.
The next day, we transitioned east into Montana. It was Glacier Day! As we drove back past our Idaho Giant spot on I-90, the temperatures dropped into the 30s, and we crossed into Montana with the mercury at a startlingly low 32 degrees in the early morning. Along a river near St. Regis, we saw an Elk from the interstate, although we came up empty on “’Murica Eagles,” which Chloe has still never seen! Driving from Coeur d’Alene to Glacier, one gets the feeling that the entire world is nothing but mountains and pine trees, with only the dry plains near the aptly named town of Plains and the valley south of Kalispell as respite from repeated breathtaking vistas.
In a small city park outside of Glacier, the thermometer read a more comfortable 53 degrees by the time we started herping just past 10am Montana time in a mix of marshy woods and yellow and paper birches, which reminded me mightily of my early childhood in Northern Michigan. After about a half hour of flipping unsuccessfully, it dawned on us that despite the dry conditions, the soil under birch logs was holding more moisture than under pine and other types of wood. Flipping only birch logs, we found our target within 15 minutes, a gorgeous Eastern Long-toed Salamander with the bold, unbroken, nearly fluorescent stripe characteristic of Montana specimens.
From there, we climbed up to the foot of the mountains of Glacier and entered the park, with the good fortune that we had accidentally made our reservation for fee-free day. To describe the overwhelming awe that visiting Glacier for the first time inspires in nigh impossible, but those of you who have been there know exactly what I mean: that place is breathtaking, and the drive from Apgar up to Logan Pass feels like passing between worlds, one forested and verdant, the other unforgiving, barren, tundra-like. I will include some scenery shots here, as well as one of a mountain goat that was taken from well over a mile away and then zoomed in as far as possible—the goat looked like a speck on the ridge with the naked eye!
On the way down from the mountain, we stopped at one of the many purple-logoed stands advertising Huckleberry ice cream and milk shakes. The mascot, fittingly, was a bear. The employees were unenthusiastic and clearly tired of tourists (who can blame them?), but the shakes themselves were great. On the drive to Missoula, on which we checked college football scores and looked back at pictures from the trip, we saw the following sign for an establishment: “Cold Beer-Casino-Kid-Friendly.” What?? The sunset and twilight behind the Bitterroot Range just north of Missoula was a sight to see, second only to desert sunsets in Arizona/New Mexico. That night, the Airbnb host had someone over (and taking our parking spot) and I had to hold back branches to get our car in the extreme left of the driveway. I stupidly did not see my right foot was in the track of the back tire. Miraculously, because I was standing on mulch, it only got the first two inches of my foot, and Chloe drove over it quickly, I suffered no injury from having my foot run over by a car!! That one goes in the “I’m so tough that” category….
The next day, we drove back into Idaho on US 12 along the Lochsa River after getting a morning hike in Missoula that resulted in no herps but a cool view of the river bisecting the park and a spate of well-groomed and well-mannered dogs that the other hikers were generally okay with strangers petting. That’s a win.
The Lochsa River is one of the most inviting, picturesque rivers in North America. At some points, it’s fifty yards across but consistently only 2-3 feet deep and crystal clear (at least during drought), and fly fishermen lined its banks and those of the Clearwater River into which it merges for over 100 miles. At a campground stop along the river, we saw several juvenile Columbia Spotted Frogs, and promptly got a big adult in a pond just off the river.
After spending an unexpected 15 minutes with a chatty gas station owner in rural Nez Perce County somewhere (he also sold guns at his gas station, and his son was coming back from a Pronghorn hunt in Southern Idaho), we hit another spot near our Airbnb for Columbia Spotted Frogs and scored these lighter-colored individuals, one of which Chloe caught (her first herp capture!).
A pretty hike in Washington at a county park turned up no Rubber Boas (although a hiker we passed had seen one there the previous week the day after a rain) largely due to the dry conditions. The rocks I flipped were kicking up dust, and haze from Canadian wildfires meant seeing more than 15-20 miles even from ridges was difficult. Hitting our camper Airbnb, we binge-watched “Indian Matchmaker,” which I liked more than I thought I would, to my wife’s surprise and delight. Not a bad day. The only possible decent lifer left was Rubber Boa, and I had little faith we’d see one under the conditions.
Nonetheless, we gave it a shot on our last day, but saw nothing except more good views, and a large moose (our first) that morning in the University of Idaho’s botanical gardens in downtown Moscow.
The local A&W was radically overpriced compared to what I remember from Michigan ones, although the cheese curds were still respectable. Some more Indian Matchmaker, and it was time to head home. It was a wonderful journey to the Northern Rockies, a place with low herp biodiversity, but where everything for me was a lifer. I wish that this under-herped section of America got more attention, because trips there can be both productive and relaxing at the same time given how easy many of the animals are to locate (I can only imagine how productive we would have been if there had not been a drought!). Happy herping!
