Matt Spears pulled his mini electric rail camper to a stop just short of a massive railroad trestle as the last light drained from the Idaho mountains, looked out at the pitch-black crossing, and decided immediately that he was not going across it. Not tonight. The old wood and tar smell was rising off the structure, a cold rain had just passed through, and every instinct said wait for morning. That hesitation turned out to be the right call, and it set the tone for two days of genuine mountain exploration that nobody had planned and nobody could have scripted.
Abandoned railroads thread through some of the most remote terrain in the American West, and the one Spears had been working his way along for months sat deep enough in the mountains that getting back to this point had eaten his entire first day. The rail car he built for it, a custom machine he calls the Spyra, runs on a home-assembled battery pack and rides on custom rail wheels. It carries a pop-up camper shell, a fly rod, and enough food to be optimistic.
Breakfast on the trestle, battery gone kaboom
Morning light changed everything. Spears walked down to the riverbank to inspect the trestle from below before crossing, running his hands along boards dipped in tar so thick it had gone almost to asphalt. He tried fishing first, casting into water he was certain held trout. One small nibble from what amounted to a minnow was all the river offered, so he climbed back up to the deck of the trestle, heated instant oatmeal, and drizzled it with honey harvested from his own beehives. He called it probably the coolest place he had ever had breakfast. Then he crossed.
The section beyond the trestle opened into a landscape he had never reached before, canyon walls dropping to a crystal-clear river, and almost immediately the Spyra lost all power. The battery pack, made up of 24 individual cells, had blown one. The top of the twentieth cell had simply sheared off, a laser weld failure Spears said he had never seen before. He rewired the pack around the dead cell, reprogrammed the controller, and got moving again. ‘Things are looking up,’ he said when the key turned and the motor engaged. ‘We are so back.’
Four trestles in a mile, and two strangers with chainsaws
What waited past the repair stop was almost implausible. Four trestles appeared within roughly a single mile of track, each crossing the same river at a different angle, each with its own log jam piled up by decades of drift timber. Spears walked every one before crossing, checking planks and stringers, looking for rot. All of them held.
Then he rounded a bend and found two men on a Predator 212-powered rail cart, no helmets, no seat belts, and a top speed they admitted had touched nearly 40 mph. They were the ones who had spent two days and a lot of chainsaw gas clearing the downed trees that had blocked Spears for months. The men led him off the main track to a hidden meadow that turned out to be a former train exchange yard, likely cleared out sometime in the 1980s. On the way, they found morel mushrooms in the undergrowth, including one specimen that made even them stop. ‘That’s a beautiful blonde,’ one of them said, handing it over. Spears took it.
He cooked dinner that second evening using a salmon fillet he had caught himself in Alaska the previous year, adding bell peppers and rice over a camp stove beside the river. The morels would have been perfect in it, he admitted, if he had found them a couple of hours earlier.
The morel that stopped two chainsaw veterans cold
One of the men crouched over the oversized mushroom in the undergrowth and held it up without saying anything for a moment. It was the kind of find that earns a pause even from people who know these woods well.
The Spyra made it back to the truck with a bent axle, a repaired battery pack, and a derailment count that Spears stopped trying to track somewhere around the big trestle. The storm that had been building behind the mountains all afternoon finally caught up on the last stretch, wind pushing hard across the open trestle deck as he crossed. He made it. Then, a few miles down the highway, his truck broke down at 410,000 miles, and that was that.
