Originally posted by: Edso
My college roommate and his wife left for Idaho after they retired 4 years ago. Sold their house in Brentwood (Bay Area) for a good penny and then bought land and built a house in Cascade, which is between Boise and McCall, I believe. They love the outdoors and have family in Boise. Their son is a pitcher for the Oakland A's. He's injured right now, but was an All Star in 2022. (Thought you might find that interesting since you are a baseball guy). Have a great time on your trip.
I spent a fair amount of time on Hwy 55, the road between Boise and McCall, about 20 years ago. The highway goes through some amazing scenery, including a narrow canyon that's great for whitewater rafting (the Payette River?). I remember seeing Cascade, which at the time was pretty much nothing but a bunch of empty lots being subdivided and one gas station/store, and thinking about buying some land and putting in a cabin. I also seriously considered McCall, a beautiful lakeside mountain town. I also thought seriously about Sandpoint, to the north of Coeur D'Alene. Two things ultimately stopped me: the winters in that part of the country are effin' brutal, and the people...well, they're conservative. As in very very conservative. As in, gun love-soaked evangelicals conservative. AND--they're pretty nasty about it. Don't dare to disagree with them! It's a very very white state, so nonwhite people need to be outta there by sundown. Northern Idaho is and has historically been home to multiple neo-Nazi enclaves, where pickup truck-driving goobers meet in the woods every weekend to shoot beer cans.
I can see the appeal of this part of the country for people who have a certain ideology. The government's policies are hard right, the governor is a proud MAGA, and the social structure is...nonexistent. Every man for himself, mountain man independence, gol-durn it. This attitude has led to such phenomena as: the existence of a sales tax on groceries (such a tax is highly regressive, but paying for state functions this way has a LOT of appeal for people moving there with a stash to build a McMansion), health care facilities so poor that Idaho shoveled thousands of covid patients into Washington and Oregon (and the governor's crusade against masks and vaccines made that much worse), and a movement to annex the conservative counties of eastern Oregon and Washington.
Northern Idaho is indeed a paradise for those who like the outdoors, enjoy guns, and think that it's all a liberal conspiracy: everything, including the weather. And of course, it USED to be pretty cheap to live there. Not any more. I kinda wish I'd bought some land in Cascade and just sat on it.
