Pulaski Tunnel Trail

The summer of 1910 was bone dry across the northern Rockies, and by August hundreds of small fires were smoldering through Idaho, Montana, and Washington. On August 20 and 21 a hurricane-force wind arrived and fanned those scattered fires into a single wall of flame. In roughly two days it burned about three million acres, an area the size of a small state, and the smoke drifted so far that ships in the Pacific reportedly had trouble navigating by the stars.

The event became known as the Big Burn, or the Great Fire of 1910. It killed dozens of firefighters and nearly destroyed the town of Wallace, part of which burned that night. The fire was so enormous and so traumatic that it shaped how the young Forest Service thought about fire for generations afterward, pushing the agency toward a policy of putting out every fire as fast as possible.

Edward Pulaski was a ranger who knew the country around Wallace well, having prospected and worked in these hills for years. When the fire overran his crew on the west fork of Placer Creek, he did not try to outrun it. He remembered an old mine tunnel, the Nicholson adit, dug into the hillside nearby, and herded his men inside. He hung wet blankets across the entrance to hold back the heat and smoke, and when the fire passed overhead the tunnel filled with hot, choking air.

Several of the men wanted to bolt back into the flames, and Pulaski, by most accounts, drew his pistol and swore he would shoot the first man who tried to leave. He collapsed from the smoke himself before it was over. When the crew crawled out the next morning, most were alive. Six had died in the tunnel, and Pulaski was badly burned and temporarily blinded, but he had saved the rest. He went on to invent the pulaski, a combination axe and hoe that is still the standard hand tool of wildland firefighters across the country.

The trail begins at a Forest Service trailhead about a mile south of Wallace and follows Placer Creek up the canyon toward the tunnel. It runs roughly two miles each way on a steady grade, shaded by cedar and fir, with the creek close at hand for much of the climb. A series of interpretive signs marks the way, telling the story of the fire and of Pulaski's crew in the order the events unfolded, so the history builds as you walk.

The path ends at an overlook set across the creek from the tunnel itself, the dark mouth of the Nicholson adit visible in the hillside opposite. It is a plain hole in the ground, and that plainness is part of the power of it, that so ordinary a place held forty men and a wildfire apart. Give yourself a couple of unhurried hours to walk up, read the signs, and stand at the overlook before heading back down.

The trail is only minutes from Wallace, a small, intact old silver-mining town in the narrow valley where Interstate 90 threads through the mountains. The whole downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a compact grid of brick buildings from the boom years that survived because the town fought to keep them. It makes an easy base for the hike and for the wider Silver Valley around it.

The valley is laced with public land and old mining history, and the Pulaski Tunnel Trail pairs naturally with the paved Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes rail-trail, which passes right through Wallace, and with the ancient cedars at Settlers Grove up the Coeur d'Alene River to the north. Together they make a full, unhurried day or two in a corner of Idaho that most travelers rush past on the interstate.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.