Road Trip Day 7 – Noxon, MT

After sleeping in, we awoke to a huge breakfast of homemade biscuits and sausage gravy, eggs, as well as sausage; all thanks to Chreyl. It’s cold in Montana; so good to eat some delicious warm food to start the day. After eating, we loaded the 4 wheelers onto the trailer and Bubba and Cheryl dropped us off on some trails that they recommended in the Kootenai National Forest. Kootenai is in the Cabinet Mountains, which extend into Canada. The trailhead we stopped at was off of Hwy 56; just off of Hwy 200; which Bubba and Cheryl live off of. I know that’s a lot of ‘off of’s, but this is the backwoods of western Montana we’re talking about. We were on some trails that followed along the East Fork of the Bull River.




We rode our 4-wheelers down to a Historic Ranger Station that had survived the massive forest fires from 1910 that ravaged the area.


The scenery all around us was amazing: crystal clear water running in the river; with bright yellow aspen trees all around us; mountains filled with evergreen trees, and some sort of a pine that changes colors with the season, were all lit up in yellow fall-time colors.


We then continued up the dirt road to a hiking trail deep back in the national forest; which was a trail to a lake. The hike to the lake was estimated to be about 6 miles or so one-way. We planned on hiking all the way to the lake; however we were overwhelmed by the literally hundreds of types of mushrooms growing along the trail. Mushrooms of every size, shape, and color lined the trail. We were enjoying our leisurely pace and took our time investigating all of the crazy mushrooms and taking countless photos of them.

We stopped along the trail at a clearing overlooking the river and enjoyed our packed lunches. After lunch, we turned back and hiked to where we parked the 4 wheelers. On the drive back to the truck, we were getting pretty comfortable on our new rigs and decided to push the speed a little bit and got up to over 40 mph on some muddy trails in the backwoods of Montana. Needless to say: it was awesome! Along the trail a huge Bull Elk ran across in front of us. Apparently, we were really luck to see one, as it is currently hunting season for elk and the males are tough to locate this time of year. We made it back to the truck safely and loaded up the 4-wheelers and drove back to Noxon. The drive back to the house was so great; the sun was setting and the road followed along the river, right through a valley. The mountains are stunning here. Once we were back at Bubba and Cheryl’s place we had a great hamburger dinner and watched some college football; Lauren’s favorite, for the evening. We headed to bed kind of early as we were planning to drive up north into British Columbia the next morning.