Wallace, Idaho

It didn’t take us long to find that Wallace is ATV country.  I guess our first indication came when we pulled into the small, narrow camping area of the Wallace RV Park, boasting 43 spaces for RV parking; there were easily forty ATV’s alone, more than a dozen mountain bikes, I counted seven children’s bikes and one golf cart, probably belonging to the park owner.  The ATV’s were either arriving, covered with dust from a hard day on the trail, getting the days dirt cleaned from it, or just parked, anticipating tomorrows trail adventure. 

Our destination in the historic town of Wallace is to take the walking tour of this historic town checking out the turn of the century architecture, such as the Northern Pacific Railroad Depot and Railroad Museum with its “elegant brick and concrete edifice, “ornate and picturesque””; the marvelous display of cast-iron cornices and pilasters; the Wallace Carnegie Library, sporting three inch thick heavy entry doors adorned with prismatic leaded glass, and then, possibly take a tour of the Oasis Bordello Museum, not to be confused with the Best Little Hair House in town, which is just across the street.   

They, on the other hand would be revving up the 350cc engines of their 4-wheel ATV’s and riding off onto the more than 1000 miles of dirt ATV trails in the area; eating dust, jumping stumps, fording the creeks, or perhaps just doing a wheelie on their Suzuki RMZ 250 as they race up the main road out of town.  We will go into the D & G Bakery and eat a pasty cinnamon roll, while they will go out on the trails and eat dirt, raw Mother Earth.

I diverge for a moment to tell you about the highlight of my whole trip; Mike Gilk.  Mike has a construction dump truck business in Winlock, WA. He, with family and friends were here for the week to eat their share of dirt on the Wallace trails.  When I first saw Mike he was knocking some of the dirt off of his Honda 350 Rancher ATV; his wife had just pulled up driving her Honda 300 FarTrax. She was so dirty that she looked like a dirt clod on wheels; must have been riding at the end of the pack. I talked with Mike for a minute, and after hearing that he was from Winlock, I couldn’t help but ask him about “the world’s largest egg”. 

Back in the old days I used to ride the Seattle to Portland bicycle ride; the STP.  The route was from the City Hall in downtown Seattle to Holladay Park in northeast Portland, a distance of 200 miles.  The “STP in a Day”, a grueling, wasting, fanatic’s ride through the picturesque backloads of Washington. One of my fond memories of the ride is when we would pass through Winlock, the “Home of the World’s Largest Egg”. http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/4033  The egg had been constructed by the city to promote the chicken farming industry.  But as Mike tells the story, there was a lot that I had missed.

The small town of Winlock had a sheriff; the sheriff had a daughter, and as most sheriffs’ daughters, she was, shall we say, a bit on the adventuresome side.  One night she had some friends steal the egg and transport it over to Mike’s and lay it on his front lawn.  Now this egg is 12 feet tall and weighs 1,200 pounds.  Then she told her dad that that dirty Mike had stolen the egg.  The trouble was that Mike and family had taken a small vacation and would not return for a week; needless to say that the joke backfired.

For the several years I had ridden the STP bike ride and I have accumulated more than one picture of me and the egg.  To have this additional history of the egg just puts the icing on the cake.

 

 

My first choice of destinations in the historic little town of Wallace was to stand right smack dab in the center of the intersection at Bank and 6^th Street; the “Center of the Universe”.  Since Wallace had humbly declared themselves to be the “Silver Capital of the World”, they had no problem also declaring that they were the probabilistic “Center of the Universe”.

One good thing we found in Wallace was the Stardust Hotel and the Red Light Garage.  I guess it was the mock UFO they had displayed out front that attracted us to it originally, but our eyes quickly focused on a large sign for “Huckleberry Ice Cream”.  We had seen about all of the “elegant brick and concrete edifice, “ornate and picturesque”” that we could take for one day, and now it was time for ice cream.  I went for the Huckleberry shake, made in one of the old time soda fountain blenders; it tasted great.

After our daily ice-cream break, we embarked on something a little different; Geocaching.  Al Hopwood pulled out his Smart Phone, equipped with all of the necessary apps, gadgets, and GPS equipment to find even the most cleverly hidden geocach treasure.  Our quest would be to find the coveted “cowcatcher” prize.  With the proper equipment and a keen sense of direction it wasn’t long before we were standing right out front of the Northern Pacific Railroad Depot and Museum, staring down at a miniature train engine, complete with cowcatcher.  Cleverly hidden out of sight under the cowcatcher was the prize.  We had won!




 

 

 Of course when Wallace you must do as the Wallaceites do; go mining.  We didn’t actually go mining; it was more like a mine tour.  The Sierra Silver Mine was initially discovered around 1900.  What seemed like a good idea at the time turned out to be a bust.  At the time all mining was done by hand, resulting in the penetration of just seventy feet into the mountainside during the first seven years of labor.

In the 1970’s the mine was used by Wallace high school as a vocational class to teach mining techniques and mine safety skills.  During just a few semesters, using modern equipment, the students extended the mine another 700 feet and opened it up as a prime tourist destination.

 

 

On our tour we were with a young mother with her two teenage sons.  She was from a long line of miners who had worked the many mines in the region.  I think that she was trying to impress upon her kids just how hard their grandparents had to work to get them where they are today and also to tell them that if they ever set foot in a mine, other than this tour, she would knock them up alongside their fool heads.

Our final destination for the day was to be the Wallace Carnegie Library.  Its Neoclassic design, a portico live bay brick structure with low-pitched roof and three inch-thick heavy entry doors adorned with prismatic leaded glass not only proclaimed that Wallace could architecturally stand head to shoulder with the rest of the world, but that Wallace was the “Silver Capital of the World”, and that it was indeed the “Center of the Universe”.