Idaho Centennial Trail Part Ia - Caching Water in the Desert

When Teresa and I came to Idaho on our honeymoon in 2011, we already knew we wanted to move to this part of the country when we retired - we just didn't know exactly where.  We rented a car and drove much of the length of the state, starting in Sandpoint and winding up in Boise.   For the next few years (whenever possible) we took an anniversary trip to Idaho in October to explore and look for our future home site.  We finally bought property in 2017, started building in 2018, and moved here in January 2019.  We have had five years now to settle in to our "forever home", and I have had many interesting adventures exploring this beautiful state.  

On that very first trip in 2011, we bought an "Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer" to help guide our travels.  On one of the pages, I saw a little red dotted line labeled "Idaho Centennial Trail".  Intrigued, I began turning pages, following the trail from map to map, finally realizing that it went the entire length of the state, almost a thousand miles north to south.  From that moment I knew that someday I had to hike that trail!

Information was sketchy and a bit hard to find, and what I did find often seemed out-of-date.  The fact was, relatively few people had ever hiked the trail at that time.  It was more of an idea - a "route" more than an actual trail.  There was a website, and some trail reports, and a very outdated book, but that was about it. 

The Idaho Centennial Trail

I bought a lot of maps and a lot of guidebooks about hiking and backpacking in Idaho, and have had some really great backpacking and camping trips in Idaho's seemingly endless wild backcountry.  But the Idaho Centennial Trail (ICT for short) was always on my mind.  It is an ambitious project to try to hike the whole thing in one season, and for one reason and another, the time never seemed right for me to start.

Fast-forward to 2024.  I finally came to realize that through-hiking the entire trail in one season is just unrealistic for me.  I decided that the more realistic approach for me is to "section hike" the trail, which means doing shorter, independent trips, but keeping track of the starting and stopping points, so that eventually I will have hiked the entire trail.  This is actually a common approach with longer trails such as the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, Continental Divide Trail, etc.  I suspect most people who take this approach do it because they are limited by the time they can take off of work, etc.  For me the limitation is simply physical - I am no longer capable of walking the daily distances required to complete it one season. 

There are now many more trail reports, YouTube videos, a really excellent guidebook put out last year by people who have hiked the entire trail, and even a Facebook group dedicated to the trail.  These resources have made it much more accessible, so it is becoming a more popular trail for people to undertake.

Wild West Trail (Includes the ICT)

The Hiker's Guide - Idaho Centennial Trail

Facebook Group - Idaho Centennial Trail Updates and Information

After finally reaching the conclusion that I was going to section hike the trail, I decided that I would start right away.  The first part of the trail goes 100 miles through the Bruneau Desert in southern Idaho, and that portion needs to be completed before it gets too hot.  Since I had already had several blocks of time marked out on my calendar for camping or backpacking through the summer, this determined where my first destination would be - the desert portion of the ICT. 

The past several weeks have been spent in a flurry of planning and packing getting ready for the hike. I spent nearly a week (31 March - 4 April)  Jeep camping in the Bruneau Desert placing water caches along the route.   It was an interesting experience with some unexpected twists.

As far as I know, nearly everyone who hikes this section of the trail places water caches in advance, as there are long waterless stretches that would make it impractical to carry enough to last the whole way.  There are some water sources along the trail, but they are either  unattractive (e.g. cattle tanks) or very difficult to reach (e.g. the Bruneau River, which flows through a very deep canyon with limited access).  I decided that I would rely on none of these sources, and would cache enough bottled water to take me through the entire hike.  I decided to place the caches about every ten miles or so, as that is as far as I feel comfortable planning to walk in one day.  Perhaps I'll find I can go further, but I decided to be conservative (at least I hope that's conservative, and not ambitious/delusional!)

I left early Easter morning for the 600-mile drive to the trailhead near Murphy Hot Springs, on the Idaho-Nevada border.   

Idaho is a Big State (we have two time zones, lol!)

By the time I got to Hammett, Idaho, I had had enough driving for one day.  Since this is the endpoint of the desert section, I decided to go ahead and camp, and to travel the trail from north to south, placing the caches in reverse order from the northbound direction I plan to hike.  I made my way to just inside public land (managed by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, or BLM), and set up camp at what I called "Desert One".   Although I set up a tarp just in case, the threatened rain never materialized and I spent a peaceful night on my Army cot out under the stars.

"Desert One"

A beautiful sunset.

The next morning I set out southward towards the first planned cache location.  I should mention that the trail in this section is almost entirely on two-track roads - Jeep trails, really. I had selected locations based on a map recon using "OnX Backcountry", my chosen GPS solution.  In an effort to reduce the weight of my pack, I have been re-evaluating gear and looking for lighter weight solutions.  In the past, I've carried a Garmin GPSMap 66i, my iPhone, a SteriPen for water purification, a Petzl headlamp, and my hearing aids in a recharger case.  Keeping these devices charged up for extended trips were a GoalZero Venture 35 battery pack and a GoalZero solar panel to keep the battery pack charged.  All this stuff weighed *way* too much.

I now have the maps on the iPhone (which has an internal GPS and which I was taking to use as my camera anyway), a LifeStraw for water purification (if needed), a 4 oz. Garmin Messenger for satellite messaging and SOS if needed, and am leaving the hearing aids in the car (they're useless in the wind, and in any case I'll be by myself).  I have never had to charge the headlamp while on a trip, and I carry an extra battery anyway.  The Garmin Messenger battery is supposed to last 28 days with tracking turned on to ten-minute intervals.  So now the only device I actually have to charge is the iPhone.  

I've determined that one day's walking with everything turned off except for the map will take about 20% of the battery charge.  So I will take a battery pack, but this time it is a "Patriot Power Cell CX" from 4Patriots.  It holds about 1.3 charges for the iPhone 15, so with consistent consumption/conservation I should be fine for the planned 9-10 day trip.  This battery pack has a built-in solar panel, so by hanging it on the outside of my pack I should be able to keep even more of a charge on the battery.  I'll be watching this closely to make sure I don't run out.   Just in case, I also have a compass and paper maps with the route and caches marked, as well as a physical printout of the cache descriptions and locations (after all, I am an Eagle Scout - "Be Prepared").

Back to the first day in the desert:  I drove south through the Brown's Creek drainage, which was beautiful green grassland that didn't feel much like desert (at least not this time of year).  I pulled up out of that drainage, and shortly afterwards I placed my first cache (actually cache #7 northbound).

Climbing out of the Brown's Creek drainage, looking north.  The Sawtooth Mountains are visible in the distance.

  

My method of caching is somewhat different from what I have seen others do.  I've seen photos (and also actually run across other people's caches) that are just plastic jugs of water placed right out in the open, sometimes with orange plastic tape or some other kind of marker.   I was just not comfortable with this.  Although everybody I have heard or read from says they have never had a problem, I couldn't see just leaving it out in the open. So my caches are buried.  Each cache consists of two one-gallon bottles of water, buried in a hole just deep enough that they can stand upright and have the tops covered with a thin layer of soil for insulation and concealment. I looked at a lot of different kinds of bottled water, and ended up selecting "Great Value" water from Walmart.  I liked these because the plastic seemed tougher than many others, and also because they have carrying handles attached.

Two gallons of water, next to the hole in which they will be buried.

I put them in a scent-free white trash bag to keep them clean and perhaps reduce the chance they might be disturbed. 

Each cache is marked with orange utility flags on either side of the trail.

Once I had selected the specific location for the cache, I would dig a hole, bury the water, and then place markers to help me find it again.  I started with orange utility flags on either side of the trail, and then put some orange plastic tape on a bush or fencepost nearby for longer-range visibility.  Then I would pace off from these markers to the actual (unmarked) location of the cache, so-and-so many paces at such-and-such a compass bearing.  After that I'd refine the GPS marker to be more exact, and then write a description of the location including any landmarks (fencepost, road intersection, trail marker, etc.).  I think that they are safe, and that I'll be able to find them with no trouble.  I like that they are out of the sun, and they might even be cold!

I continued south, placing caches and taking time out for some sightseeing.  (I will save the descriptions of some of the cool things I saw for the actual trip blog).  I got three more caches (#6, #5, and #4) placed that day, and then I made camp for the night.

"Desert Two"

I have a pretty well-established routine setup for Jeep camping.  Depending on the weather, I use either the Roadhouse Tarp or the Slumber Shack Tent for a roof.  In this case it was another beautiful clear night under the stars.

Sunrise at "Desert Two", looking south towards the Jarbidge Mountains in Nevada.

On Wednesday, I woke up to a beautiful desert sunrise, had a leisurely breakfast, and then packed up to drive south placing caches 1-3.  My plan had originally been to turn around and drive back north when I was finished, following the same route northbound, fixing the locations of the caches firmly in my visual memory as they would appear to me as I approached them on foot.  But several stretches of the trail in this area were so bad, so rough, with with so many sharp rocks, that I decided it was not necessary to subject my Jeep to the abuse.  I would drive north on the gravel roads to Hammett, and from there drive home.  But there was a fly in the ointment...

Somewhere in the course of this day, I realized that I had forgotten a crucial step.  In another attempt to reduce the weight of my pack, I had divided my ten days' worth of food into two five-day packages, and planned to cache one of these at the location I expect to reach at the end of day 4 (cache #4).  This would give me a one-day food buffer in case of the unexpected, but reduce the weight of my pack considerably. My backpacking menu is about a 2500-calorie per day menu, and weighs almost exactly 2 pounds per day, so this meant ten pounds I wouldn't be carrying for those 4 days.

But for some reason I just forgot to do this.  So now I had to backtrack to cache #4 and bury the food.  I headed north from Murphy Hot Springs on Three Creek and Clover Three Creek Roads, and turned west at Indian Hot Springs Road.  This very quickly became "Indian Hot Springs sort-of-kind-of-road-but-really-just-dried-mud-with tracks-in-that-general-direction".   Several miles of the access road in this area had obviously been a quagmire up until recently, and now it was a mostly-dried up maze of vehicle tracks that ranged back and forth where people had tried to find the dryest ground.  Despite my best efforts to stay on smooth firm ground, these dried-up wheel ruts would periodically grab my tires and force me to follow them until I could get out again.  It reminded me of the slot cars I had as a boy.

I finally got back on the main north-south trail and reached the area of the cache, but while looking at the GPS to see how close I was, I took my eyes off the road at exactly the wrong moment, and disaster struck before I could react.

I had managed to slide up against a sharp lava rock that damaged the sidewalls of both my right tires.  The rear one was shredded beyond hope, and the front was losing air fast.   Once I got the Jeep stabilized (rear wheel replaced by the spare, and the weight off of the front tire so it wouldn't break the bead and could still hold air), I had time to think about how the heck I was going to get out of there.

The offending rock.

The rear tire was toast.

The front tire was also ruined.

I had plenty of food, water, and fuel, and I'd thought I was well-prepared for emergencies: high lift jack, tire repair kit, large can of Fit-a-Flat foam, Smittybilt air compressor, and spare tire.  But you can't really fix a torn sidewall.  The tear in the front tire was only about an inch long and it was holding air (albeit leaking very fast), and I had four rubber plugs in my repair kit, so I thought maybe I could use them to plug the hole, then use the can of Fix-a-Flat after that.  Perhaps that might have held air long enough for me to get out.  If that didn't work, I figured I could load up my backpack and hike out, leaving my Jeep in place.  But I *really* didn't want to do that.

I had a Garmin Messenger with SOS, but this was not life-threatening and didn't seem to warrant pushing the SOS key. I also learned you can text 911, but it didn't seem to me like a "911" emergency.  Then it occurred to me that I had already arranged for a "trail angel" to drive me to the trailhead next month, and I had his number in my phone already.  I messaged him via the Garmin and asked if he could find a commercial tire service that would respond.

He immediately expressed a willingness to come out there himself to help, which was a huge relief and immediately made me feel better.  He then worked the problem, and was able to find a tire service (Commercial Tire in Grandview, mobile 208-598-5993) who were able and willing to respond.  Less than 24 hours after I had ruined my tires, Aaron from Commercial Tire was onsite with his contact truck and some used loaner tires, and had me fixed and on my way with a usable spare less than an hour after he arrived.

So I spent an extra night in the desert (I was a bit preoccupied, and do not have a photo of "Desert Three", nor of the tire damage in situ, lol).  But I learned some valuable lessons. I even learned (from the shuttle driver while getting new tires) that there is such a thing as a sidewall repair kit!  It is for emergency repairs only, but could get you out of the backcountry and to someplace where you can get a more permanent solution.  

 

After becoming mobile again, I drove the half-mile or so to cache #4 and buried the food package.  This is secured in OpSaks to seal in the food odor and UrSacks to keep the critters out.  I then made my way out of the desert and placed my last water cache in a convenient location for the last night out, which will leave me a short hike into Hammett where my Jeep will be parked.  I ended up camping one night longer than planned, which subjected me to a ferocious thunderstorm. I'd been trying to "thread the needle" and catch the few days of good weather, and it would have worked if I'd kept my eyes on the road, lol.

I drove back to Coeur d'Alene the same way, as usual enjoying the breathtaking scenery in this beautiful state.   I look forward to going back next month for my first-ever extended hike in desert terrain, and my first section-hike on the Idaho Centennial Trail.

Mood:  Happy

Music:  Silence