#1 of 2. July 2022 – The Idaho Backroads Discovery Route

WE’RE BACK!! The Hixsons and Taylors take on the IBDR

After a couple of days to relax and regroup after finishing the Continental Divide Trail, we were up and on the road again. What better way to find our way back south toward Arizona than the Idaho BDR. (We’re running it backwards, north to south)

The Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route (IDBDR) is a scenic route across Idaho State from Southern Idaho to Canada through numerous Mountain Ranges. The route follows a connection of mostly unpaved backroads that can be ridden on dual-sport and adventure motorcycles or driven in 4×4 and high-clearance 4WD vehicles.

If you’ve ever wanted to travel endless twisty mountain roads, the Idaho BDR will throw corners at you for days on end. You also won’t get many digital interruptions because your cell phone won’t have reception on much of this route. It’s a true off- the-grid ride with plenty to see along the way!

The route is divided into 8 sections or tracks.

We’ve already completed tracks 8, 7, 6, and part of 5 and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to get online!

We have a Garmin Inreach so we’ve kept in touch with family via satellite text. Up on the mountain ridges we were getting one bar on Verizon which was enough to get out a simple text. It may be better with another carrier but we don’t know. Be aware, if you’re going to do this trail there is little or no reception. That’s what we’ve found so far on the northern sections.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Track #8

Back to the Canadian border at Porthill, Idaho to start.
Here we go!
started off nice and easy….
Turkeys!
Yep. We’re already done with easy. Time to really get off road.
More nice gravel roads.
These two rigs are still going strong. It’s been a busy summer!
July 13 – Big Eddy Campground, it’s free! And the mosquitoes were relentless.

Thursday, July 14

Track #7

We seem to jump them out of bed
Starting to see downed trees.
And then miles of this. These cuts were obviously made by and for the side-by-side enthusiasts. We could barely squeeze through as these cuts were made to discourage full sized vehicles. We have a chainsaw just in case.
Lunch!
Single width shelf roads
One of many burn areas
July 14 – Wallace RV Park Campground. Plenty of room in the grassy tent area for multiple Jeeps. Nice showers!
The only problem with wonderfully historic Wallace is that we couldn’t find our way out of town! We hit many dead ends. The track maps were useless, but we finally found our way out of town.

This is great. We were thinking after tracks 8 and 7 that we can finish one track per day at a leisurely pace and be done.

Not so fast, 6 and 5 were very different….. I’ll post more soon.

6 thoughts on “#1 of 2. July 2022 – The Idaho Backroads Discovery Route

  1. I’m starting on Monday 7/28 going south to north, hope to run into you guys as you finish up and we get started

    Like

  2. Love Following your trip! We are on the Snake River, between Kennewick and Prescott, WA. Had several days of little to zero cell service while in Trout Lake, WA. Love Idaho! We are heading to Bend OR next week.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s