Wednesday July 2, 22.0mi/35.4km

Round Mt State Forest (914.9/2250ft) to Calder Mt (892.9/5410ft) (ID)

I left camp at 6:15 aiming to be at the General store at 7am when they opened. I was a little delayed, however.

The General store is also the post office, the coffee shop, and the ice cream shop. I decided to get a creamsicle flavor in a large cone.

The store’s employee was super friendly, and she correctly guessed that I was hiking the Idaho Centennial Trail. She let me charge my phone while I sat at the table in the mailroom area, while I ate my breakfast of microwave burrito, ice cream, and delicious grapefruit juice. I bought food and snacks for a couple more days, though I could have done a full resupply here, it was a pretty well stocked store. I finally hiked out just before 9am, and had a couple hours of uphill roadwalking.

This was a strange sight. Not only did somebody paint an entire boulder, they must have used a bulldozer to lift it up onto the stump. Why?!

As I continued further and further uphill, the dirt road gradually diminished, until eventually it was just a single track trail.

I wasn’t sure what type of trail I was expecting to find, given that it’s not shown on any of the maps that I have. But it was surprisingly nice, sometimes it went through meadows.

And sometimes through dense forest.

Every time the trail went through a formerly wet area, I saw tons of large hoofprints in the dried mud. I couldn’t tell if they were from elk or moose. But I could see this being prime Moose habitat.

By mid-afternoon I had finished the climb up to Kelly pass, and now it was time to descend a little bit to Boulder Creek. I was pretty confused when the trail junction was not where it was supposed to be, I spent 20 minutes searching before I figured out they had moved it a quarter-mile uphill. It was newly constructed trail so that was nice, probably only four or 5 years old. Unfortunately, about half a mile was covered in many fallen trees.

It took me 30 minutes to cover that half mile where the forest decided to be horizontal, ugh. But once that cleared up, the trail went back to being perfectly nice again. It even had wooden bridges over the wet sections!

I don’t know the name of this big leafy plant but it makes a cool noise when you hike through it.

I stopped for a break at a campsite near Rummy Creek, and it had the most interesting picnic table I’ve ever seen.

The day was getting late, and I had lost some time throughout the day, looking for misplaced trail junctions, so I was happy to see the next trail junction was exactly where it was supposed to be.

The hike along Boulder Creek was easy as the trail followed an old two-track road. I filled up on water before leaving Boulder Creek for the final time, as I knew I would be up on a ridge walk most of the day tomorrow. I filtered water as fast as I could since the hordes of mosquitoes were extremely friendly. I happily hiked away from that creek, and after about 5 minutes, the mosquitoes disappeared completely. I had an easy climb up to the ridge on a nice trail, and I almost missed the trail junction in the meadow, since the sign was on the ground.

The day was getting late so I decided this was my camp spot.

It’s a beautiful spot on the ridgeline, hopefully it doesn’t get too windy since I’m a little exposed in the meadow.