Magruder Corridor Road

The corridor follows a route the Nez Perce used for generations to cross the Bitterroots between the plains and the Camas Prairie — the same high country the 1877 fleeing bands traversed, a story told at waysides along the road. It takes its modern name from Major William Magruder, who blazed a wagon-scale route through here in 1868 to link Montana mines with the Salmon River mines; his toll-road dream died with the mines, but the track remained. The Forest Service kept it open as a single primitive corridor between two enormous wilderness areas — the Selway-Bitterroot to the south, the Frank Church-River of No Return to the southwest — so that today it crosses roughly a hundred miles of country with no town at all, the longest such stretch on any forest road in the region. Magruder Ranger Station, halfway, began as a 1930s guard station. Travel is practical only from July into early October after snowmelt; the road is narrow, washboarded and one-vehicle-at-a-time at the cutbanks.