ICT Day 1: May 27, 2021

We started our day finishing up a few water caches we were not able to get to. In hindsight, we should have cached our water a few days (or weeks) in advance, but I’m not really much of a planner. I mean, I only decided to thru-hike this trail three weeks ago…

We took all the back dirt roads and worked our way backwards from Bruneau Overlook. We ended up yellow-blazing much of the trail, oops. I used Dan Noakes as a resource for good places to water-cache and we ended up placing 2.5 gallons every 17 miles or so.

With the majority of the day navigating endless dirt roads that seemed to be a giant maze, we reached the southern terminus at 8pm on May 27th, 2021. It was obviously an exciting moment. I mean if I didn’t feel excited at the beginning, I don’t when I would be. With it being the beginning of summer in Idaho, we still had a solid 2.5 - 3 hours of sunlight left. So we made the decision to at least get some sort of milage in.

The trail begins in the Jarbidge wilderness. The Jarbidge wilderness starts several miles south, in Nevada. It encompases the Jarbidge mountains, Jarbidge canyon, and the itty bitty (almost ghost town) of Jarbidge Nevada. It goes north into Idaho until the Jarbidge canyon turns into the Bruneau canyon. You’re able to see the tippy top of the still snow capped Jarbidge mountains for miles in the Owyhee desert. The elevation here is around 5700 ft with the Jarbidge canyon to the west. Inside the canyon, there is a beautiful campground in the town of Hot Springs Idaho.

The first positive miles we had was on FR 288. Blocking our view of the desert was a little hill. It’s only about .5 north of the terminus. It’s a short climb to the top. The dome of the hill starts to reveal the vastness of the journey that is ahead of us. The Owyhee Desert. Behind me I can see Jarbidge Peak and to the west I can see Merritt Mountain shadowing over the Jarbidge canyon.

We only make it about 4 miles before it gets dark, so we set up camp on a nice flat spot right after the first gate after you cross Three Mile Creek Road. At 11pm we are still able to see a sliver of orange in the sky.

I'm always nervous the first night when I'm camping or backpacking or whatever. I mean, we did see a wolf chasing a pronghorn earlier... But I'm completely safe in my fortress of a tent right?? No way a man eating wolf can get through this incredibly thin material. Elijah is just using a tarp set up, so maybe the animals will go for him first.

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Dan Noakes' water cache GPX file: ICT Water Cache Desert.gpx - Google Drive

This is what I followed and it worked out really well.