Pend Oreille River pedal-powered rail buggy provides complete outdoor experience

Riding the rails in a four-seater, pedal-powered rail buggy along the Pend Oreille River last weekend was a surprisingly complete outdoor experience.

The inaugural day of trips for the Rail Rider excursions provided eye-grabbing scenery, togetherness with friends, a couple of hours of surprisingly vigorous exercise, exposure to the elements, fleeting sightings of wildlife, a brief encounter with biting insects and even a glimpse of death.

Expectations surpassed.

The North Pend Oreille Valley Lions Club is presenting the Rail Rider Excursions for the first time this summer to replace its popular scenic train rides that had to be shut down because some of the trestles could no longer handle 150-ton locomotives.

My wife, Meredith, and I reserved one of the 11 custom “rail riders” with friends Ron and Jane McDonald for an outing that offers a perfect linear venue for conversation. “You don’t even have to steer these things,” Jane noted, snapping a selfie as the nifty plastic wheels rolled quietly on the rails.

The recumbent seats were so comfortable, the women quickly realized they couldn’t let Ron and I have the back two seats for the 9-mile tour.

“Everybody has to pedal,” Jane insisted.

Indeed, when a little headwind combined with a stretch of 1.5-percent grade, heart rates picked up.

“You’re lucky to have four pedalers,” said a dad who was joined by his wife and two nonpedaling kids. He was mopping beads of sweat off his brow with his sleeve.

The seats are somewhat adjustable. But the 6-foot-4 guy behind us said there wasn’t enough adjustment to keep his knees from nearly punching his chin with each stroke.

The attentive Lions Club volunteers send the rail riders out in a spread-out group that must stop three times during the trek to bunch up for supervised road crossings.

But each rail buggy is mostly in its own world.

Deer darted across the track and browsed in the fields. Skeletons of road-killed deer lay in the right-of-way in the section along SR 31. We crossed several trestles, including an eye-catcher towering over Cedar Creek.

We passed an A-frame fort of logs that local kids had built in the woods, and we gazed into the rusting remains of a shuttered sawmill.

At 3 miles, more attentive Lions Club volunteers stopped the group at the trestle over Box Canyon Dam. While riders stretched their legs and snapped photos of the dam, the helpers turned each buggy to face the opposite direction on a hub device mounted between the rails.

Then we rode back, feeling relatively sporty heading down the 1.5-percent grade with a slight tailwind. Some riders donned their rain jackets – one popped open an umbrella she’d brought along – when rain began to sprinkle the landscape.

A few riders, including the family with the two small kids who’d eaten all of their fruit leather, called it quits at the 6-mile point as they returned to the Lion’s Club Depot. Other rail riders continued pedaling south for 1.5 miles where they were greeted by another group of attentive Lions Clubbers.

They turned our four-seaters around for the return trip to the depot as others passed out dabs of insect repellent to keep the late-afternoon flight of skeeters at bay until we could start pedaling again and outrun them.

After nearly two hours on the rails, we dismounted the rail rider we’d nicknamed Turbo and left it in the good hands of attentive Lions Clubbers.

The McDonalds gave the expedition two thumbs up, noting that it met a main criteria of a worthwhile outdoor experience.

Said Ron, “I worked up an appetite!”