South of Sun Valley, however, everything changes suddenly. Besides scenery, the valley also abounds in history, holding many key sites pertaining to the explorers Lewis and Clark, the first nonnatives to set foot in the region, and other sites related to the epic struggle of the Nez Perce Tribe and their leader Chief Joseph (known to his own people as Hinmatoowyalahtqit).Īs you pass over the Bitterroots into Idaho across the Continental Divide, the scenery remains impressive as US-93 winds along the banks of the Salmon River, all the way to its source in the serrated Sawtooth Mountains, then drops down swiftly into Sun Valley, the oldest and most upscale ski resort in the country. Western Montana’s natural beauty reaches a peak in the Bitterroot Valley, which stretches south from Missoula all the way to the Idaho border. South of Kalispell, the highway winds across the Flathead Reservation along the western shores of Flathead Lake to Missoula, located at the heart of the bountiful country captured in the film A River Runs Through It. Passing the western flanks of Glacier National Park, US-93 runs along river valleys through diverse communities where skiing, hiking, and sightseeing have replaced mining and lumbering as the economic engines. The northern section, from the Canadian Rockies wonderland of Banff and Jasper south as far as Sun Valley, Idaho, is pure alpine majesty. The route divides into two almost unrecognizably different halves.
Besides offering up-close looks at mile after mile of magnificent and almost completely untouched wilderness, US-93 also takes you right through the neon heart of what is surely the most extreme (and most extremely visual) example of our contemporary “civilization”: Las Vegas. Starting in the north, across the Canadian border at Jasper National Park in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, and winding up south of the border in the Sonora Desert twin towns of Nogales (one in Arizona, one in Mexico), this route, which retains the number 93 despite the different international jurisdictions, traverses some of the wildest and most rugged lands imaginable: mighty mountains, glaciated valleys, raging rivers, and two very different deserts. The western half of North America is often described as a land of contrasts, and no route across it gives a sharper sense of the region’s extremes than US-93.
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