An Ode to the Cheap Hotel, a Hiker’s Best Friend

Outside’s Trail Magic hiking columnist Grayson Haver Currin recently completed the triple crown of hiking when he finished the Continental Divide Trail this past November. 

The Mountain View Motel & RV Park in Lima, Montana is a bit of a broke-down relic, a roadside archive of interstate architecture weathered viciously by time. Its front office is a riot of maps, souvenirs, and ostensible trash, all tossed akimbo. The room doors are faded and bent, handles catawampus in a way that suggests the long-ago spats of late-night fights between young lovers.

And the rooms themselves are reliquaries of another America, where thrift and permanence had yet to make way for planned obsolescence. The curtains are retired bath towels, the bedside tables survivors of a town thrash heap. Stained from decades of bodies and bubbling soap, the graying porcelain tub is surrounded by the exact cerulean tile I sledgehammered in my grandmother’s bathroom as a preteen.

This is the type of motel that my mother never would have allowed us to stay in during our family road trips decades ago. She would have demanded that my father press ahead in the family Ford Explorer to some chain hotel along Interstate 15.

But early last August, standing on the shoulder of an I-15 frontage road beneath ominous slate skies, I desperately waited for a ride to The Mountain View Motel as though it were some Edenic haven, an oneiric escape. By then, my wife Tina and I had trudged more than 800 miles through Montana and Idaho along the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), crossing roller-coaster terrain with 6,000 feet of gain and loss a day earlier. We collapsed into the wounded little sedan that eventually shuttled us there as though it were a chariot of the gods. We ate so much breakfast at Lima’s only open restaurant that we didn’t worry that the steakhouse everyone loved was closed for the day, meaning we’d need to forage in a convenience store for supper.

At The Mountain View, where the night’s stay cost $51 split three ways, I rifled through that waste in the front office—actually, a series of three overflowing hiker boxes, full of secondhand supplies—like it was the grocery store Lima doesn’t have. I sank into the bathtub, its dirt less a concern than my own, and stayed in its simmering water so long that I emerged deliciously woozy from the heat, staggering around in a towel destined to become drapery. That evening, the stranger in the room next door, living largely out of his car, offered to fry us potatoes on his propane stove while we lay in bed, blissed out on gas-station ice cream, Shark Tank reruns, and weed we’d walked with since Helena. Long before dawn, I was up writing at a wobbly old desk with chipped veneer. The Mountain View had everything I needed.

I adored it, still do. Because even the Mountain View felt like an oasis during our thru-hike.

What Should a Room Cost, Anyway?

Estimates vary wildly, but recent studies suggest that the average American hotel room runs from $148 to $212 a night. I am happy, however, to report from the front lines of dirtbag dives that all the luxuries an exhausted adventurer needs—a hot shower, a bed, and, in most cases, even a little black refrigerator that smells permanently stale—can be found from coast to coast for $100, or often, much less.

There’s the Hitching Post Country Motel in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, for $85 along the Appalachian Trail; the Y Motel in Chama, New Mexico, near the Colorado border on the CDT (also $85); the Packwood Inn in Packwood, Washington ($129), where the Pacific Crest Trail veers toward Mount Rainier. These are all beaten but beatific spaces, family-owned joints that care not about welcoming you into the lap of luxury but about providing just enough to send you back on your way the next morning.

As I’ve walked up and down the country and across half of the American states during the last five years, cheap hotels have served as crucial stopovers. Their staffs are rarely judgmental about how dirty I am when I arrive, how much trash I put in the dumpster when I leave, or how many hikers we squeeze into a single room. They are accustomed, after all, to transience, to people arriving on one personal threshold or another.

Such spots are under-sung hubs of outdoor adventure, allowing for big conquests that adhere to relatively little budgets, no matter if you’re walking the CDT or biking or cycling it, canyoneering along Arizona’s Mogollon Rim, or climbing in California’s Pinnacles, living in a van and needing a break, or just on a car-camping road trip. I want to say thanks to those who own and operate these cheap hotels, to the often-ignominious or altogether overlooked dives that enable us to press on. They hint at the comforts of home but not so much that we stay for too long.

Not Only a Stopover

There is, of course, a privilege to all this, to so much of what we do outdoors and adjacent to it. I have chosen repeatedly to slog my way across the United States and to stay in places that fellow middle-class Millennials would see as roughing it. My neighbors in these places have often been the dispossessed or houseless, down and out for any of a dozen reasons.

Several folks staying at The L Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona (where rooms start at $35 despite that town’s tourist boom) seemed like they’d always been there and had no plans to depart. My wayside indulgence was their survival, and respecting the space we shared despite that difference has been a crucial elements of my long walks. We spend so much time in our cloisters, walled off from the ways the rest of the world lives. I’m as guilty as anyone. These hotels are a reminder of our own relative comforts, no matter how much your legs and arms ache.

It all reminds me of something the artist and songwriter Terry Allen wrote while a student at what would become CalArts, back when it was bankrolled by Walt Disney. “The quaint American town doesn’t have a wrong side of the tracks,” he railed in a diatribe against Disneyland’s fake utopian microcosm. “The castle doesn’t have serfs.” It is good to get out of the woods and into the world, to recognize the difficulties our society shares. Along with a shower and a sleep, these hotels allow for an essential bit of real-world seeing.

When In Jackson Hole

About 200 trail miles south of Lima, an old hiking friend scooped us from the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone and braved the park’s seemingly ceaseless construction to drive us to Jackson Hole. There are, of course, very few towns in the United States better and worse suited to adventure pursuits than Jackson. It is surrounded by an absurd abundance of pristine public land, but it is also home to the absurdly wealthy, meaning that my beloved $100-or-less hotel rooms are almost impossible to find. You can park your RV downtown, as I often have, but finding a low-end room is a low-odds endeavor.

So we went the other way entirely, getting comped a room at the goddamned Four Seasons at the base of Jackson’s most famous ski resort, because I happen to write for this magazine. It was a wonderful and ridiculous and silly experience, with an hour-long personal tour of the imaginative wildlife art that graces its hallways like some hidden museum and a truly gluttonous steak dinner that, were it not also free, would have tanked our hotel budget clear to the Mexican border. In the room, the pillows felt like dinner rolls allowed to rise to maximum loft, the sheets like premium lotion. My mom would have loved it, and she would have insisted that we never leave.

But swollen from steak and wiped from walking, I found myself in bed that night doing what I almost always do in a hotel while on trail: a little stoned, a whole lot of Shark Tank. All of this luxury was nice to have, sure, and I’d be a hypocritical ninny to complain about it, to describe such a gift with anything other than gratitude. I didn’t need any of it, however, and none of us really do. Thru-hiking resets my baselines with social media, food, suffering—and, turns out, with the level of luxury I want.

I woke up before dawn the next morning and wrote at the Four Seasons’ desk, just as I’d done in Lima, until it was time to leave. I grabbed a few fancy tea bags on my way out and tucked them into my backpack, assuming they wouldn’t roll like that at the Pronghorn Lodge in Lander, Wyoming, a few hundred more miles to the south. They did have a tub, a bed, and a television. That was enough for me.