*Motorcycle Roads NorthWest

Located just outside of Culdesac Idaho is one of the neat little roads tucked away up on the hilltops of northern Idaho.

It’s an amazing old road, with emphasis on Old and a double word bonus of Narrow. The road is barely the width of one and a half lanes of a modern roadway, and this one doesn’t have anything that I’d call a shoulder.

The curves are very tight and typical of Idaho, the shoulder gravel is the same color as the roadway as it’s paved with local stone. Most of the curves are very tight: most of the outside curves have no guiderail to demarcate the outside edges and the ‘inside corners’ have oncoming traffic is usually coming across the inside of your lane.

It’s a great road though and the vista is well worth the trip, not only from the top but also from many points along the way up.

This is the wide section.

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I must say that I’ve kind of fallen in love with the sweeper roads of North Central Idaho. The roads gently weave in between the rolling hills of trees and fields, with an occasional village with a gas station and market, with hardly any other vehicular traffic out on the road.

This particular road is perfect for a relaxing 50-60mph cruise back to your hotel in the afternoon. You just need to watch out for the extremely high concentrations of elk and whitetail deer in this area though.

One good friend got hit by a guided missile of the hooved rat variety. Bambi got her check paid in full, and said friend ended up with a seriously smashed up tourer and some well-used riding gear.

Route 8, West of Elk River

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This is a really neat grade.

It doesn’t have the magnificence and grandeur of Whitebird, but what you lack in scale you get in rhythm. Harpster Grade seems to almost glissade down the side of a ridge. The corners are all about the same radius and angle of directional rotation, which sets them up very nicely for being dispatched at a speed that might be otherwise uncomfortable on more technical roads such as Spiral Highway or the Whitebird.

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This road is one of those little country roads that ends up being curvy by virtue of the fact that it has to go in between existing farms, and it’s conveniently situated to go over to the town in the next valley. It’s a tableau full of sweepers, executed in chipseal with excess-gravel shoulder, but otherwise it’s a good grippy surface without much in the way of heave or buckling and no tar snakes.

One note of concern for sportbike riders and newbies: East of Lenville Road, this road is gravel. You’ll get up to a fork in the road: on the left is the Lenville road which is gravel, and on the right is the continuation of Genesee-Juliaetta Road which turns to gravel shortly after the bridge.

I was in a bit of a hurry so I did not do the entire gravel section, but the section I did was quite washboardy.

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If one were forced to describe Idaho roadways with but one word, there’s no better choice than ‘Solitude’.

Having ridden down and around the “interesting” side of Lake Coeur d’Alene, I needed to get back over to the highway to find my way down to the Lewiston and then Rattlesnake Grades. Idaho Route 5 provided that route and a bit more.

Route 5 runs between St. Maries and Plummer along the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene and twists up through the canyons and along the fjord-like carved inlets of the lake. Quite literally, when heading west of St. Maries you are faced with 13 straight miles of road that are anything but, well, straight.

And else do you win by riding Idaho 5? You’ll get some fantastic partial views of the lake. You’ll run alongside busy railroad tracks and under narrow gaps in rail trestles. You’ll get those fantastic 44 curves before reaching the farms east of Plummer. If it’s summer, you’ll also get that wonderful resiny pine scent hanging in the air. And best of all, you’ll have this road almost completely to yourself on a weekday or a quiet Sunday.

Old Barn outside St. Maries (by Robert Ashworth. Creative Commons: Attribution)

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