Going Wireless on the Hiawatha Trail

A gruesome discovery and a letter from a longtime member launched a massive volunteer project that may span decades.

Five years ago, Larry Bottemiller and Curt Nizzoli came across an interpretive sign along the Route of the Hiawatha Bike Trail that piqued their curiosity. They weren’t far from where the trail passes from Montana into Idaho through the 1.6-mile-long St. Paul Pass Tunnel, better known as the Taft Tunnel. The sign depicted old cabins perched above the west portal of the tunnel. The longtime friends and hunting buddies decided to climb up and see if any foundations remained. They found no sign of cabins, and thick brush and steep terrain discouraged them from taking the same route back down to the bike trail. 

While trying to find an easier path, Bottemiller, hiking slightly ahead of Nizzoli, walked right into a little clearing. A complete skeleton of a heavy-beamed, five-point bull elk lay in front of him. The bull’s antlers were still brown, so it had likely died no more than a year earlier. 

As rare as it is to find a bull elk skeleton undisturbed by scavengers, there was something even more unusual. Over 40 yards of quarter-inch electrical wire had a stranglehold on the animal’s antlers.

The bull had made his last stand in this small hillside clearing, his tines hopelessly tangled in rusted red and insulated black wire. He churned the thick vegetation down to the dirt and tore up trees in his desperate struggle to escape, eventually expiring from exhaustion and starvation. 

“We had to just stand there and stare at it for a while,” said Bottemiller. The skull was resting on the ground with the wires stretching taut from both sides, cross-tying the animal between two decaying utility poles. 

“Feeling how tight those wires were...” said Nizzoli.

“His head was almost bouncing off the ground,” finished Bottemiller. 

The friends retrieved a pair of pliers from their truck and painstakingly cut the skull and antlers loose. Bottemiller took the skull home. Neither of them could put the bull’s death out of their minds.

Now, five years later, they were headed back to the clearing for the first time since making the find. “This was honestly a one-in-a-million chance, wasn’t it?” Curt Nizzoli said as I followed him up a 45-degree sidehill, clinging to mountain maple and false azalea, dodging spiky devil’s club and stinging nettles. I had to agree. Finding a skeleton in this tangled vegetation was definitely a long shot. The find, and Nizzoli’s response, was the reason there were 40 work-glove-clad Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation volunteers crawling through the Idaho Panhandle National Forest for two days in July of 2021. 

Nizzoli, tall and blonde-mustached, held a pair of hefty wire cutters in his right hand. After 150 feet of scrambling up through the dense vegetation, we glimpsed nine parallel strands of wire snaking through the brush, weaving through a loom of fallen trees. This was it—the defunct electrical wire that volunteers were here to remove.

Ahead of us, a shrill whistle rang out. A pause. Then another whistle. I followed Nizzoli and a camera crew toward the sound like a game of Marco Polo. A traverse of the steep slope led us to the secluded postage-stamp clearing where Larry Bottemiller stood, looking right at home in the woods with his fiery red beard and hefty black leather work boots. He pointed to where bleached vertebrae and rib bones still marked the spot five years later. “I stumbled across this and hollered, ‘Curt, get over here!’” 

Standing in this gorgeous place that had once been a death chamber, I imagined the animal’s fury as it was first ensnared, its desperate tree-cracking struggle and the rattle of its exhausted final breaths.

I could see the wonder and horror coming back to the two friends as they relived their find.

Below us we heard the happy sounds of people chatting as they pedaled along this crown jewel of the rails-to-trails system—the Route of the Hiawatha bike trail. Above, the single-note call of a varied thrush pierced the branches of old grand firs, echoing and forlorn, like a distant train-whistle. 

Railway Remains

This deadly wire is an artifact of the Pacific extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, aka the Milwaukee Road. Stretching from Chicago to Seattle and traversing the rugged Bitterroot Mountains, the Milwaukee Road was constructed in record time from 1906 to 1911. 

In August 1910, the infamous “Great Burn” scorched part of the rail line. In a matter of hours, a lethal blend of ripping wind and bone-dry forests torched 3 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. Coal-fired locomotives were a likely source of many of the fires that melded into a massive conflagration. In a 1911 report, a supervisor on the Coeur d’Alene National Forest attributed more than 100 fires to trains launching embers into parched terrain. However, the trains also saved residents and railway workers in the nearby towns of Grand Forks and Falcon when the inferno closed in. Conductors loaded panicked people aboard and engineers drove the trains over flaming trestles into tunnels where they hunkered down and survived the flames. 

This epic disaster drastically altered forest management and prompted the railroad to convert its line to electric locomotives along the 440‑mile stretch from Avery, Idaho, to Harlowton, Montana. That overhaul cost $23 million—the equivalent of about $660 million today. 

Over the next half-century, though, rail traffic on this section of the Milwaukee Road dwindled away. The Olympian Hiawatha, a high-speed passenger train, made its last run down this line in 1961, and the final freight train chugged through in 1980. 

The line was abandoned but found new life when it was repurposed as a “Rails to Trails” bike trail in 1998. Visitors can now pedal 15 miles across seven towering trestles and through 10 tunnels, beginning with the pitch-black Taft Tunnel—which runs for 1 2⁄3 miles underground and connects Montana and Idaho. Just under 70,000 people rode the trail in 2020, up from the previous record of almost 60,000 the year before. 

Meanwhile the electrical wires that had once brought power to the locomotives still snaked along above the trail, sagging and falling to the ground as wind, rot and gravity took their toll on the poles. Forests grew thick and the wire became a casualty of that all-too-common human phenomenon: out of sight, out of mind. At least until Nizzoli and Bottemiller stumbled upon the stark demise of the tangled bull.

Getting the Wire Rolling

An RMEF member since the ‘90s, Nizzoli lives in the Puget Sound area, but hunts in northern Idaho each fall. The sight of the bull’s gruesome death spurred him to action. He thought of the miles and miles of wire still creeping through the woods, a booby trap just waiting to ensnare elk, deer, moose and other wildlife. He remembers a hike he took nearby just three months after finding the dead bull. 

“As I got about 200 feet from the trail, I stopped dead in my tracks. I had wire going across my thighs and my chest. I didn’t even see it, didn’t know it was there. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s mule deer height.’ I figured there are probably a lot more casualties here that we don’t know about. The best way to remedy that was to get a bunch of people up here to remove all this.” 

Turning to the organization he trusts to improve and protect elk habitat, Nizzoli wrote a letter to RMEF asking if the organization might set up a volunteer project to start removing the wire. He knew RMEF put on similar projects across the country to remove old fencing. “I’d hate to see more good bulls die in this manner,” he wrote.

Nizzoli’s letter contained a photo of the dead elk’s wire-covered skull. Then in the summer of 2019, Nizzoli connected RMEF northern Idaho Regional Director Wayne Brood with a Forest Service ranger since the wire lay on national forest. RMEF began working with the U.S. Forest Service to set up a volunteer work project. The Forest Service coordinated with Idaho’s Historic Preservation Office to help take care of legal details. Since the Hiawatha Trail is leased by Lookout Pass Ski Resort, which provides shuttles on that stretch of the bike trail, the Forest Service coordinated with the resort as well.

Finally, in July of 2020, roughly 40 volunteers showed up for the inaugural Hiawatha wire pull workday and wrested about a half mile of the deadly nine-strand wire from the mountainside, filling pickup beds with neatly hand‑rolled coils.

With hundreds of bikers zipping past, it became an education and outreach opportunity as well. Loren Smith, chair of RMEF’s Mini-Cassia Chapter out of Burley, Idaho, volunteered the first year and returned in 2021. He was amazed by how many bicyclists expressed gratitude for the volunteers after they realized what they were doing for wildlife habitat. “They were all applauding and cheering us on as we were driving through. That was really cool to get a huge standing ovation for the work we were doing.” 

The 2020 volunteer project was featured in an RMEF film, The Letter, captivating audiences at RMEF big game banquets and other events throughout the country.

Return to Hiawatha 

After realizing this would be a project that could span decades, RMEF volunteers extended the 2021 work to fill two days instead of one—Thursday and Friday, July 8 and 9. On Thursday a few lucky volunteers strapped on new pairs of Danner boots. Danner sponsored the RMEF film, The Letter, and the 2021 sequel titled The Affect. The volunteers grabbed wire cutters and work gloves and got to work.

Bottemiller once again brought the wire-wrapped skull and antlers and displayed it in a pickup bed. The volunteers gathered around it in the early-morning sun. A Swainson’s thrush sang background music during a safety briefing from the Forest Service. Then Wayne Brood spoke. 

 “I want to introduce Curt Nizzoli and Larry Bottemiller. They are the two that found this,” he said, gesturing toward the skull. “Curt got the ball rolling, and that’s why we’re all here today.”

He also shared lessons from the 2020 project. 

“We found out last year that a 100-foot stretch [of wire] is about all you’ll be able to bring out at once. Logistically, we’ll have to break up in two or three groups. If we can get the wire down next to the trail, we have a spooler that we can put on the hitch of a pickup and reel it up and tie it off,” he said.

By 8:30 volunteers split up and hiked into the woods to start removing wire in the five different locations flagged by a Forest Service employee. At 11:30, everyone would reunite at Wayne’s truck for sandwiches and snacks flawlessly catered by his wife Debbie. 

 After I visited the site of the bull elk’s skeleton with Nizzoli and Bottemiller, we pulled on gloves and joined a group of volunteers.

Like a well-oiled machine, we ducked overhanging branches, busted through brush and clambered over blowdowns in pursuit of the lethal wire. Some severed old strands with bolt-cutters, while others tugged it out from under deadfall. I helped drag loose sections of wire out of the woods. On the way down, unruly loops of it hung up on brush, tree roots and branches. I slipped and slid my way down the steep grade to the edge of the bike trail where I dropped off the wire before climbing back up to grab another load. With each trip up and down, I was removing one more piece that would never entrap an elk. 

As it came time for the lunch break, some volunteers worked right on through while others took a moment to scarf down sandwiches and cookies. Cooler lids creaked, dispensing ice-cold Gatorade and water. As the volunteers chatted and shared their contagious passion for habitat conservation, I met Carole Rowland, who loaded up her three dogs and drove over 1,500 miles from Iowa to reach the work project for the second year in a row. 

“I would see all the work projects that were happening, and I thought, ‘It’s time to get involved,” she said. ‘I’m tired of reading about them, I need to go do something about it.’” 

She called up RMEF headquarters in 2020, asking to be informed anytime there was a project to volunteer for, no matter where it was. Four days later she got a call from Wayne Brood, letting her know about the Hiawatha wire pull.

Julie Rittenberry, a volunteer from the Treasure Valley Chapter in Boise, officially joined RMEF only a couple weeks before the project. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Rittenberry discovered RMEF when she went on a veteran’s hunt partially funded by RMEF grants. In hunting camp Rittenberry watched The Letter. She was hooked. 

“This is a sad ending,” she told me, pointing to the elk skull. “And who knows how many other animals are being affected by it.” 

She says ever since she watched The Letter, she kept the dates of the project free for 2021, hoping to volunteer and make a difference for wildlife. 

Leslie Maston and her boyfriend Adam Turnidge hail from the Palouse White Pine Chapter in Moscow, Idaho. Maston has been involved with RMEF for 15 years, Turnidge for 23. He’s currently chapter chair. The two drove 3 ½ hours to reach the project. 

“Seeing the amount of wire that we’ve pulled out in just a few hours up here is dumbfounding,” said Maston. “I keep looking at it and I cannot believe there’s that much. And just knowing how much more is actually up there—if we had even more volunteers, we could take out that much more.”

Alyssa and Dalton Crane from St. Maries, Idaho, are in their first and fourth year respectively as RMEF members. This was their first volunteer work project, about a two-hour drive from their home.

The young couple made a family trip out of volunteering. They stayed at a nearby campground with their two young children and the kids’ grandparents. 

Alyssa and Dalton see this project as a perfect opportunity not just to do good things for elk and other wildlife, but at a place where so many people just riding past can become aware of the problem and know RMEF volunteers are working hard to set things right.

People like Jennifer Ghan of Kellogg, Idaho. Ghan stopped her bike after seeing the elk skull and antlers along with blue “Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Work Project Ahead” signs. 

“Seeing that massive mature elk completely covered in this wire—people don’t even think about that happening in this forest,” she said. 

Watching the volunteers at work also increased her interest in RMEF. “I’ve been wanting to join. If I could get involved in something to meet like‑minded people who want to help these animals and the environment they’re living in and the impact that they have—let’s do it.”

In It for the Long Haul

By the end of the day Thursday, volunteers had extracted another mile of the nine strands of wire, with plans to repeat that feat the following day.

 “That means we’ll have to come back for another 20 to 30 years to get all the way down to the end of the railroad and then up and over on the Montana side,” Nizzoli said. Although he’s already thinking far ahead, he was very happy with the turnout for the 2021 project. 

“It just shows the caring and the can-do attitude of the volunteers,” said Nizzoli. “It’s a great organization. I mean, they care. Seeing that many people come out is really gratifying.”