Boise News

And Here We Have Idaho

The High Mountain Pleasures of an Idaho Family Hike

By Jill Kuraitis, 6-30-09

Daughter and her loyal Honeybear.

Hiking to Shirts Lake, accessible from West Mountain Road around Cascade Reservoir in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, was a part of our kids’ childhoods. The fishing, camping, swimming and messing around in the mountains turned them both into lovers of nature and the earth. Son is a hiker and mountain biker, and Daughter, close to finishing a degree in environmental science, wants to spend her life trying to save the planet. Getting kids outdoors really does help them stay rooted in what’s real.

The lake, no doubt named after somebody named Shirts, rises from the town of Cascade’s 4,760 foot elevation to 7,700 in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, where it is no longer early spring but not quite mid-spring.

That means wildflowers and songbirds, and a weekend family hike to Shirts took us through meadows and mountainsides grinning with both.

Although about a third of the trail was open and green underfoot, there was some serious bushwhacking, with abundant spring growth on the syringa, aspen saplings, pines and berry bushes. It was so warm we all had bare arms, and like badges of honor, we compared wounds - and bug bites - later in the day.

(Here is the part where we skip over the epic altitude sickness episode. Let’s just say I’m not the most outdoorsy of the four of us, and the tale is already family lore.)

Pushing through the clumps of purple Columbine, Forget-Me-Nots showed themselves to be the bluest blue flower of them all. Iberis at altitude seemed more beautiful than the cultivated variety, and starburst Cleome were just barely opening.

The many tiny creeks were running well, and one of the best things about this hike are the several small waterfalls along the way, set in yawning green woods cool enough for moss, lichen and mountain lilies. Little girls look for fairies in magical pockets like these.

The yellowest of all woodland songbirds, Yellow Warblers flew from the smaller trees across the path, singing their chips and zeets and what sounds like “See-See-See-Don’t You See?” Backyard birders everywhere will recognize the song of the Black-Capped Chickadee, which lives in both towns and forests. Mountain Bluebirds, the state bird, will show themselves a little later in the year.

At about 7,000 feet, the mouth of a spring presides over a view of the lake. For some joyful dog reason, our mutt Honeybear thought she’d found nirvana.

We saw not another living soul on our hike up or down.  At the top, we sat by the lake, ate our sandwiches, played catch-and-release with frogs and watched a tiger muskie menace the tadpoles. The dog swam goofy circles in the lake, biting the water and snapping at bugs. It was a blissful feeling, on this rare outing with our grown children, knowing only we four shared the high mountain pleasures around us, in those brief, precious, family hours.

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