North of the Selway-Bitterroot, the trail hop-scotches along the Idaho-Montana border on the backbone of the Bitterroot Mountains for more than 85 miles (137 km) on high ridges.
While the Milwaukee Road promoted the Olympian Hiawatha and its scenic route through Idaho and Montana's Bitterroot Mountains and the Cascade range in Washington, the railroad competed with the Great Northern Railway's Empire Builder, the Northern Pacific Railway's North Coast Limited and the growing airlines.
To support themselves, they worked a variety of jobs in fields such as railroad building, mining and lumbering, and spent one winter trapping fur animals in the Bitterroot Mountains.
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The area provides a high quality wildlife habitat in an ecosystems that represents an ecological transition between the dry, sagebrush dotted grasslands of the Columbia Basin up toward the timbered Selkirk and Bitterroot Mountain Ranges that rise up to the east.
Following an arduous trek through the Bitterroot Mountains, suffering through a mid-September snowstorm and near starvation, the Corps of Discovery expedition camped with the Nez Perce tribe on the Weippe Prairie outside of present-day Weippe in 1805.