Why the Lolo Is Legend

Gray clouds move as low as smoke over the treetops at Lolo Pass. The ground is white. The day is June 10. It has been snowing for the past four days in the Bitterroot Mountains. Wayne Fairchild is getting worried about our trek over the Lolo Trail–95 miles from Lolo, Mont., to Weippe in Idaho, across some of the most rugged country in the West. Lewis and Clark were nearly defeated 200 years ago by snowstorms on the Lolo–the name apparently comes from Lawrence, a French-Canadian trapper killed by a grizzly in the area in the 1850s. Today Fairchild is nervously checking the weather reports. He has agreed to take me across the toughest, middle section of the trail–“but with this weather?”

When Lewis surmounted Lemhi Pass, 140 miles south of Missoula, on Aug. 12, he was flabbergasted by what was in front of him: “immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow.” Nobody in what was then the U.S. knew the Rocky Mountains existed, with peaks twice as high as anything in the Appalachians back East. Lewis and Clark weren’t merely off the map; they were traveling outside the American imagination.

Today their pathway through those mountains carries more mystique than any other ground over which they traveled, for its raw wildness is testament to the character of two cultures: the explorers who braved its hardships and the Native Americans who revere and conserve the path as a sacred gift. It remains today in virtually the same condition as when Lewis and Clark walked it.

In most seasons, the Lolo is passable only from July to mid-September. At the Lolo Pass (elev.: 5,233 ft.), the Forest Service is building a log cabin and a warming hut that will serve as a Lewis and Clark interpretive center when finished later this year.

The Shoshone guide who led the Corps of Discovery, old Toby, took a wrong trail almost immediately. He took the explorers down almost 3,000 ft. to the impassable Lochsa River rather than staying high on the ridgeline. They camped the evening of Sept. 14 on the riverbank. The men had to kill a horse to eat, and as they dined that clear evening, they heard ominous claps of thunder. The next morning it was snowing.

The Powell Ranger Station is built near the old campsite. Joni Packard, the ranger in charge, wonders why anyone would want to cross the Lolo in this weather. “The snowpack is 120% of normal, and the temperatures we are seeing now are…unusual,” she says. The rangers have not been up in the high country since last fall. On our next morning we start hiking up the Wendover Ridge, the route that Toby eventually recovered. The narrow trail leads through cedars and Douglas firs, and we pass clumps of bear grass, huckleberry bushes, dogtooth violets and carpets of wild strawberry plants in the clearings. The smell of wild licorice is on the air. But the going is tough. “The road as bad as it can possibly be to pass,” wrote Clark about this trail. “Emence quantity of falling timber.” Several of the expedition’s horses tumble down the hillside–one smashed Clark’s writing desk; two others were too badly hurt to continue.

We have two horses with us and fare little better. Led by John Indrehus, a horse packer with a pistol strapped to his belt, the horses struggle over fallen trees, and one, having cut its leg open, bolts, nearly running us down. By late afternoon we climb to the snow line, and the horses, each 1,200 lbs. of skittishness, start shying as they sink into the drifts. Indrehus is worried that one will break a leg under a buried log. “That’s why you bring the pistol,” he says. Fairchild decides to camp early and send the horses back the next morning.

We are now down to three: besides me, Fairchild and his army buddy Rich Galli, who met each other in Italy, where they were mountain-warfare instructors. Galli was infantry and Fairchild artillery–as were Lewis and Clark, respectively. Soon we are skirting 10-ft. snowdrifts, now and again postholing into a soft patch up to our thighs. By midday we crest the ridgeline, where we can start to make out the vast wild expanse that stretches away on all sides. To our north are 1.8 million acres of the Clearwater National Forest, to the south are 1.3 million acres of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area. The skies have cleared, and our cheeks redden from the sun bouncing off the snow. We traverse endless slopes, trying not to lose the trail.

“Found great dificuelty in keeping it,” wrote Clark on Sept. 16, “as in maney places the snow had entirely filled up the track.” The expedition was having a miserable time. Clark wrote he was as “wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life.” Lewis had calculated that the 33-member party needed four deer a day to feed itself. The hunters killed only five deer over 11 days, plus a stray horse, a dozen grouse, a duck and a coyote.

But by then the members of the expedition had bonded so strongly that there were none of the discipline problems that the captains had faced in the first part of the trip. “There is something compelling about being on a lucky expedition,” says Galli as we stop for a drink of melted snow.

Our luck too is holding with the weather, although the snow keeps getting deeper. As we climb to Indian Post Office, the highest point on the trail at 7,033 ft., the drifts are 15 ft. and up. We have covered 13 miles in soft snow, and we barely have enough energy to make dinner. After a meal of chicken and couscous, I sit on a rock outcrop on top of the ridge. There is no light visible in any direction, not even another campfire. For four days we do not see another human being. We are isolated in a way that mixes fear with exultation. In our imagination we have finally caught up with Lewis and Clark.

In the morning we push on, and shortly after noon we reach Howard Camp, where Fairchild draws water from the same Howard Creek that Lewis and Clark did. The sun and the altitude are making us light-headed. By late afternoon we have descended to Saddle Camp at 5,300 ft., where the snow is as mushy as a daiquiri. An old logging road runs across the ridge, reminding us that remote as we think we are, the loggers have been here before us. Every so often we see the scar of an old clear-cut a couple of ridges from the trail.

Lewis and Clark were under no illusions about being the first to discover the Rockies. Everywhere they went they found traces of Indian tribes. We leave Saddle Camp shortly after dawn, while the snow is still firm, and walk 4 miles up to the Smoking Place, a peak with a 360[degree] view that was sacred to the Indians and was graced then–as now–with stone cairns. The Nez Perce who guided the expedition’s return in June 1806 insisted they stop at the peak and smoke a pipe. Lewis was enraptured: “From this place we had an extencive view of these Stupendeous Mountains–from which to one unacquainted with them it would have Seemed impossible ever to have escaped.”

Today the view is still as breathtaking–little has changed here in 200 years, except the cairns. Last August vandals threw half the rocks from the three 4-ft.-high cairns down the mountainside. Fairchild found the damage on a trek with eight clients, and they spent time retrieving some of the stones and rebuilding the cairns. “What type of person would do this? Search me,” he says.

There are some bare patches on the southern slope, and white phlox flowers are already in bloom. Bees are at work on them. The season is short here; by September the snow will start again. The window of survival is very narrow on the Lolo. It nearly slammed shut on Lewis and Clark. We add a few more rocks to the cairns and take our leave.

When I get off the trail, Erwin Myles, head of natural resources for the Nez Perce, is waiting for me. We go salmon fishing together–his tribe has fishing rights on the Rapid River, part of the Columbia River system. Like many Indians, Myles is ambivalent about celebrating the discoveries of Lewis and Clark. But compared with the vandals who desecrated the Smoking Place, he sees the two captains as models of diplomacy. “There’s much to be learned from how people conducted themselves a long time ago,” he says. For the Nez Perce, it is about respect–respect for other people, respect for the landscape. That is the lesson of the Lolo Trail: wild, rugged, steep, remote, it too commands our respect.