Buddies Pioneered the Idaho Centennial Trail 

Roger Williams, Syd Tate call their 83-day trip a once-in-a-lifetime experience  

By Steve Stuebner

 

The first golden ray of sunlight bounced off shiny columns of basalt in Black Canyon, deep inside the Owyhee desert on the Idaho-Nevada border. Syd Tate rose with the sun, making coffee in his trail-worn charcoal-colored aluminum pot. Tate had a slight knot in his gut that morning, a natural extra dose of adrenaline in anticipation of the monumental journey ahead.

He looked at the soft-yellow light on the brown canyon wall. Somehow he knew that he and Roger Williams were going to make it. After five years of preparation, they finally were about to begin the first-known south-to-north trek through Idaho. By Williams’ plan, they would hike 10 or more miles a day for three months to hike approximately 1,200 miles through one of the most rugged mountainous states in the nation.

Here at the Nevada-Idaho border, Williams, a retired research wildlife biologist for the Idaho Fish and Game Department, and Tate, retired owner of Tates Rents, an Idaho-home grown chain of rental-equipment stores, would begin the journey under blazing hot, clear days in the Owyhee Plateau, at an elevation of 6,100 feet. They would hike along the west side of the West Fork of the Bruneau River, a deep chasm with rare access. The canyon is rimmed by rhyolite and basalt lava rock, a magnificent display of spires, columns, vertical walls, and waterfalls. It’s a gorgeous view, walking along the rim of the canyon,

	McGowan Peak in the Sawtooth Wilderness - courtesy, Roger Williams

and it’s quite easy to feel absolutely alone. In the uplands of the Owyhee Plateau, endless slopes of sagebrush and juniper roll on for infinity. No roads, powerlines or development. Just you, the canyon, and the sagebrush.

That’s how Williams and Tate wanted it. Williams selected a route that traced through the wildest, most remote and least developed parts of Idaho. They could have started the hike in May, but they didn’t want to run into snow in the Sawtooth Mountains, some 5,000 feet higher, to the north. Once they hit the Sawtooths, they would be hiking through the gnarly interior of Idaho – the Salmon River Mountains, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, the craggy Idaho-Montana divide above the St. Joe River, and onward into the wettest region of Idaho, the white pine and cedar forests of the Panhandle.

Waiting for the snow to clear made sense. But by June 21, the days were sizzling hot. “We hiked in the mornings and evenings and shaded up in the middle of the day,” Tate recalls, grinning at the challenge. This backpacking duo had a ton of experience. They possessed a strong can-do type of attitude. A little heat wasn’t going to set them back.

“At no time did I entertain the thought that we’re not going to make it,” Tate says. “We were going to make it. It was a given.”

It seems appropriate that Williams, who was 59, and Tate, who was 52, were the first two human beings to pioneer a north-south crossing of Idaho in 1986. They started backpacking well before it was the vogue thing to do – in the late 1950s and early 1960s – and Williams knew the state’s backcountry better than almo

Sid Tate hikes through Seven Lakes Basin in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness - courtesy, Roger Williams

st anyone. He intentionally picked a route that avoided civilization to the maximum extent possible and coursed through the state’s many wilderness areas and scenic jewels.

Williams’ and Tate’s journey became the inspiration for creating the Idaho Centennial Trail during the state’s Centennial year in 1990. Although the trail they blazed did not follow the exact route of the ICT, much of the route they followed is similar to the final route picked by state and federal officials. Their experience is instructive for anyone who attempts the ICT in one year.

Williams says it took him five years to plan and chart the route. “The main thing was to avoid roads and developments, and given a choice, stay high.”

He also wanted to walk through the “best of Idaho” in places such as the Sawtooth Wilderness, the Bruneau Canyon, the Middle Fork of the Salmon, Chamberlain Basin, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, and the Continental Divide along the Idaho-Montana border. Starting from the Nevada border, the backpacking duo would drop 3,000 feet in elevation to the Snake River, and then climb to the route’s high point of 9,700 feet above Redfish Lake in the Sawtooths.

	The Idaho Centennial Trail runs along a long ridge spine on the Idaho-Montana border in the Bitteroot Mountains - courtesy, Roger Williams

Then, the route would take them on a roller-coaster ride through the mountain interior of Idaho for hundreds of miles. The lowest point of the route was 1,700 feet near the Kootenai River in the Idaho Panhandle.

Their ever-so generous wives would resupply them with food and clothing 12 times (about every two weeks). They completed the journey on Sept. 14 at the Canadian border. “We made it without serious mishap,” Williams says. “And we had one tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Tate enjoyed the mellow feeling he got on the summer-long trek, just taking it one step at a time, one day at a time. “You get into a mindset that doesn’t really compare with anything else,” he says. “If you’re out for a three-day trip, you get a mindset for a three-day trip. When you’re out for almost three months, you don’t really think about anything more than what you’ve got in front of you on that particular day.... Every day was different. We always looked forward to the next day and what it would bring.”

Williams’ route-selection -- that is, often staying high on ridges for the best views – often allowed them to look back and see where they’d been the day before, and to look ahead, to see the landscape ahead. “Some of the ridges were so high we could look back and see where we’d been even two days before,” Tate says.

Both men used external frame packs for the journey. They started out with a cook stove, a water purifier and a small wood saw, but over time, they ditched all of that equipment to save on weight. They cooked all of their meals in trail-worn pots and pans on a stick fire. They each carried four quarts of water. “The farther along we went, we realized that we could get by with less and less and less,” Tate says. “The nice thing about backpacking is it’s about the most simple way to enjoy life as there is. The key is to keep it simple.”

Hiking through fileds of heather near Kelly Creek in the Clearwater National Forest - courtesy, Roger Williams

 

In the last third of the hike, they ran into rainy weather – for five days in a row. Finding dry wood was a challenge, Tate recalls, but keeping their sleeping bags and clothes dry after that many consecutive days of rain was difficult. “It was tough,” he recalls. Williams had arranged to stay in a Fish and Game hatchery building on the fifth night, near the town of Clark Fork. Both of them were greatly relieved to get out of the rain for a night and dry out their things. But Tate remembers that they looked so ragged that the hatchery manager’s wife made them stay in an outbuilding, as if they were kooks.

“I think it’s how we looked more than anything else,” Tate says. “We were skin and bones. I had a beard sticking way out, and Roger was looking pretty scruffy, too. They were pretty wary of these odd-balls who showed up at their door.”

Tate remembers the segment of the trail from the Lochsa to the Stateline trail as being among his most favorite moments, too. “Up on top of the border trail, I never felt further away from the rest of the world,” he says. “We saw an Idaho-Montana marker, and I felt, boy, we are by ourselves up here. It’s quite rocky and there’s a lot of exposed granite. From the Montana side, the terrain fell away kind of gently, but on the Idaho side, there were sheer drops into a number of lakes basins. There was a new lakes basin around almost every bend.”

 

	Grizzly bear in the Idaho Panhandle - courtesy, Idaho Department of Fish and Game

At times, they had to drop from ridgetops and bushwack for water. Some nights they’d go dry and hope to run into water on the next day’s hike. “There were times when we got thirsty at night,” Tate says. “A gallon of water a day could get pretty thin.”

One day they ran into dense fog in northern Idaho. It was the closest they ever came to getting lost. But along with the guidance of a compass, they followed an old wilderness phone line that kept them on track. “We were glad it was there,” Tate says.

On Sept. 14, Williams and Tate hiked the last leg of the journey along Boundary Creek – aptly named, of course – and crossed into Canada in wet rainforest. They had done it. Their wives joined them for a champagne toast at the border, and they drove back to the Coeur d’Alene Resort to clean up and devour a tasty first-class meal at the luxury resort. “My wife met me with a razor,” Tate says, grinning.

At the trip’s conclusion, the two scruffy guys looked each other over and realized that their bodies had been transformed. Both of the athletic men had lost about 20 pounds. “Our legs looked like a weight lifter’s and the top half looked like a prisoner of war,” Williams said.

After nearly 90 days in the Idaho backcountry, Williams and Tate had seen only a dozen people on the trail. They saw most people rafting down the Middle Fork. They enjoyed many views of wildlife, but not quite as many as they had hoped. They saw a few coyotes, elk, deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, black bear and “a good number of rattlesnakes.” They didn’t run into a mountain goat, and they never saw a grizzly.

                       
“There’s an extreme amount of satisfaction that comes with a trip like that,” Tate adds. “I can’t think of anything better than spending an enjoyable summer hiking the Centennial Trail. Idaho is such a diverse state, and you never fully appreciate that until you’ve hiked the length of the state, from the desert, to the mountains, to the rivers, to the rainforest. It’s quite a place.”

                       

Steve Stuebner is the author of Discover Idaho’s Centennial Trail. This article is excerpted in full from Chapter 3 in the guidebook.