It's 6 feet deep on the roof of the lodge, and over head-high everywhere a snowplow or shovel can't reach.
It's piled against the windows, slumped over the tops of undriven pickups and advancing like white weeds in an untended winter garden. Even the mail truck got stuck on Friday.
And it was not quitting on Friday. A constant veil of white fell all day, fighting to a standstill the Dentons' and their employees' efforts to stem the flurried tide.
“I've shoveled a lot of snow working in Alaska, but this is pretty amazing,” said Johnny Carpenter, who bartends at the lodge on the Idaho side of Lolo Pass.
All in all, it has been an awesome winter at the Lochsa Lodge. The place is full nearly every weekend with snowshoers, skiers and snowmobilers. But lately, since a series of avalanches thundered across U.S. 12 west of the lodge and the Powell Ranger Station, things have slowed.
“I never realized how much business we must have been drawing from the road,” Don Denton said Friday as he took a break from running his snowplow. “It's really been cut back since all the slides.”
The Idaho Department of Transportation closed the highway east of Lowell at the beginning of January. A dozen trucks were stranded on the road after the first slide, and another took one truck - loaded with logs - into the Lochsa River.
Westbound traffic on the highway currently ends just west of the lodge, but passenger vehicles bound for the lodge or the ranger station are being allowed over Lolo Pass.
“We're booked full for the weekend, but I'm not sure people know we're open,” said Don's wife Andrea. “We're just hoping to get the word out that we're still out here.”
It's a bit strange to suddenly find oneself at the end of the road. Not lonely exactly, but a bit cut off.
“We've been coming back from Missoula and coming down the pass to the lodge and realized that we just haven't passed anybody going the other way,” Andrea Denton said.
The Dentons have made trips to Missoula for supplies, but their isolation from the rest of Idaho has produced one supply problem - beer.
“The deal with that is that to sell beer you have to buy it in the state you intend to sell it,” Don Denton said. “So we can't buy beer in Missoula and sell it in Idaho. We're going to make it, but it's an interesting problem to have. You can't be snowbound without beer.”
Even with visitors struggling to make it to the lodge, it's never quite empty. The crew from the Powell Ranger Station makes it over for dinner and drinks regularly, as do the folks from the highway maintenance facility up the road.
Those folks amount to a snowy community that somehow passes the week. Then things get hopping on the weekends.
“One thing is that people are just little kids when it comes to snow,” Andrea Denton said. “They're just so happy and bouncing around.”
The snow, Don Denton said, has become a bit too bottomless for snowmobiling, but snowshoers and skiers are having a banner time in the endless powder, and until the avalanches, people were still making it back to Jerry Johnson and Weir Creek hot springs.
That means the 20 cabins at the Lochsa Lodge have been close to full on the weekends. And that means the lodge's eight employees have spent as much time with shovels in their hands as they have with their regular tools of the trade - glasses, plates and linens.
“It seems like about all we do is shovel, but it's been fun,” said Tom Bayne, who does carpentry work and remodeling for the Dentons.
On Friday, Bayne and Bryan Gary were shoveling 6 feet of snow off the roof of the main lodge.
“Don wanted to leave the snow on for a while to settle the logs in the new lodge, and I do believe they've settled quite nicely,” Andrea said with a laugh. “Much more and the snow might just smush the place flat.”
In that case, the lodge won't be open. But until further notice, the lodge is open, the highway is open to the lodge and the snow is falling by the foot.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com
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