This 34-day solo bicycle tour in Idaho and Oregon was a theme tour with a goal to visit and soak at as many hot springs as possible. I visited 39 hot springs during the tour and soaked in 31 of them. 32 in Idaho and 7 in Oregon. The route was selected to maximize the number of hot springs but I also visited other natural wonders such as the Sawtooth mountains and Craters of the Moon National Monument.

The route includes 3 long sections of unpaved roads with no services. In Idaho, 30 miles along the middle fork Payette river and 94 miles from Featherville to Atlanta to Arrow Rock Dam. And in Oregon, 67 miles from Frenchglen to Hart Mountain to Plush. I planned to pedal even more unpaved roads in Idaho but the road from Ketchum to Featherville was closed due to forest fires.

THE ROUTE

The first 20 days of the tour is a clockwise loop in Idaho starting and finishing in Boise. The loop includes several round-trip spurs: 30 miles up the middle fork Payette river, 7 miles up the south fork Payette river, 95 miles down the Salmon river, 45 miles to Craters of the Moon, and 4 miles up the middle fork Boise river.

In the maps below it's easier to visualize the route if you click the button in the upper right and select "Terrain" view.

The last 14 days of the tour I pedaled west from Boise, meandering across the sparsely populated deserts of southeast Oregon. Then I crossed the Cascade Range and descended to home in southwest Oregon.

GETTING TO BOISE

I planned the route a year in advance but didn't investigate how to get to the starting point in Boise. My first thought was to ride a Greyhound bus from Eugene to Boise. But the bike would have to be boxed and I couldn't find a source for a box large enough for my recumbent bike. Plan B was a one-way car rental from Eugene to Boise. The cost was only slightly more than Greyhound. I rented a "small SUV" (Mercury Mariner) to make sure the bike and all my gear would fit inside. My wife drove me an hour north to Avis car rental at a Sears store in Springfield, Oregon. I got on the road at about 10AM and drove nearly 500 miles east through Bend, Burns, Ontario, arriving in Boise at about 9PM. I found a cheap motel just west of downtown Boise. It turned out to be next door to the car rental return. In the motel room I loaded up the bike and got my gear organized for an early morning departure.