The first day of our trip was spent driving with small stops to stretch our legs. We spent the night in Missoula, Montana, then headed across the Idaho panhandle.
Last year, I read a book called “The Big Burn” by Timothy Egan that had been recommended by my friend, Karen. Since I love to visit historic places that relate to books I’ve read, I had the area around Wallace, Idaho on my list. “The Big Burn” tells all about the huge wildfires of 1910 that popped up all around the west with the worst area centered in eastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, and western Montana. Smoke from these fires was seen as far away as New York, and ships 500 miles out in the Pacific couldn’t navigate by the stars at night because they were blotted
out by the smoke.
One-third of Wallace was burned during the “Big Blowup”, two days in August 1910 that contained the most intense burns.
Wallace is a small town about 50 miles east of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, situated up in some beautiful pine forests. It is where the movie “Dante’s Peak” was filmed, and has been declared the “Center of the Universe“. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. On September 25, 2004, the mayor of Wallace declared it to be the probabilistic center, and said that someone would have to prove it not to be so. Apparently, no one has done that yet, because there is a manhole cover that states that it is, indeed, the center of the universe.
We walked around town, checking out the shops and cool buildings. During planning for the freeway construction, a large number of buildings were threatened with demolition, so the town got all of its buildings registered on the National Historic Register and required the freeway to be built above the town rather than through it.
After visiting Wallace, we traveled just a short distance south of town to hike up to the Pulaski Tunnel, a famous place where Ed Pulaski led a number of firefighters to safety inside a mine shaft. It is a 2-mile (one-way) hike on packed earth with embedded rock. It’s not a difficult hike but it is a steady ascent. The trail runs along the West Fork of Placer Creek so there are lovely water sounds all the way, plus it is just beautiful. The trail has many well-done interpretive signs that explain the Big Burn, the “Big Blowup” when Pulaski’s crew was caught at Placer Creek, as well as information on the still-used firefighting tool he invented, the pulaski, which is a combination axe and mattock.
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