Boise County reopened early. People worried cases would surge. They haven’t.
On a recent weekend in Idaho City, a dozen bikers ducked into Trudy’s Kitchen for breakfast after a ride up Highway 21. Later that night, bar-goers at the Gold Mine Grill & Saloon danced to a blues band playing on the Trailer Park stage. Few people donned masks.
As Treasure Valley residents prepare to enter an exceptional fall — with Boise schools entirely online, many workers still at home and masks now a part of everyday life — visiting Idaho City can feel like stepping back into a pre-COVID world.
Restaurants like the Gold Mine regularly host live music on the weekends. Students are back at school, with athletes resuming most practices. The campsites near town are more crowded than ever.
Bobby Mathews, owner of Idaho City Grocery on Highway 21, said he has done everything he could to make life there feel as normal as possible.
“People have come in with masks, then taken them off and said, ‘Wow, we’re in America again,’” he told the Statesman by phone.
In March, restaurateurs and shop-owners in Idaho City feared the pandemic would spell months of lost revenues, or even force them to shut down. Sympathetic to their plight, the sheriff and county commissioners struck a deal with the business owners: They could quietly reopen ahead of Gov. Brad Little’s phased re-opening plan, and so long as things didn’t get out of hand, there would be no enforcement.
Since then, businesses have had a stronger summer than ever. If the pandemic shut down other cities’ economies, it has served only to invigorate Idaho City’s.
“It’s been busier than normal, with a lot of people escaping the Valley,” said Boise County Sheriff Scott Turner. “The weekends have extended into the weekdays. We start seeing people fill up campgrounds on Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
That has frustrated some residents who worry that out-of-towners will bring the virus in. The sheriff’s office has received multiple requests from residents asking to keep tourists from straying too close to residential neighborhoods.
Turner’s response?
“We can’t,” he said. “As a county, there’s public land all around us. And the business owners rely on outside business to survive. It’s either all or nothing.”
So far, though, the numbers haven’t proved as dire as some of the naysayers foretold. The county saw its first case on June 25. So far, the rural county, with a population of 7,163, has seen just 65 cases. That’s a rate of 8.3 cases per 1,000 people, compared with 24.8 in Ada County.
Turner chalks that up to the precautions that businesses have put into place.
Mathews said, “We’ve exactly followed everything to the T of what Central District Health wanted us to do.”
But the Central District Health Department, whose jurisdiction includes Boise County, has issued only recommendations, not mandates, for the county — and it’s up to businesses to decide which ones they want to follow. (The department has mandated mask use in Ada County since July.)
Mathews, for his part, provided a mask and gloves to every one of his employees — but left it up to them to decide whether to wear them. Mathews also directed his employees to sanitize door handles and other high-contact surfaces every 15 minutes.
A few blocks north, at Diamond Lil’s Steakhouse and Saloon, owner Holly Call has done her best to follow social distancing protocols. When big groups arrive, she pulls out tables to make sure the restaurant won’t be crowded.
But the hardest part of reopening amid a pandemic, she said, is the demand.
“We have too much business for our business,” she told the Statesman by phone. Her business has been short-staffed all summer.
That’s a dramatic turnaround from earlier this year, when it seemed as if the summer would be a bust. In June, the organizers of the annual Gold Dust Rodeo canceled the event. Residents were torn up. Businesses thought about their lost sales from a weekend that typically brought in dozens of tourists from around the state.
Normalcy, though, prevailed. A group of locals created a new rodeo called the Jack Pine Round-Up. During the weekend of July 17, the event filled the seats of the Idaho City Arena with spectators donning cowboy hats and cheering for the bull riders and barrel racers.
Idaho City was back in the saddle.
But not every business in town has decided to reopen.
Just south of downtown, The Springs emptied its pools in March and has left them dry since. Kurt Gindling, one of the hot springs resort’s general managers, says it isn’t safe yet to open a business that is predicated on sharing space “with 100 strangers at a time.”
“Our choices are: Forego social distancing, forego all recommendations and open up recklessly and focus on business,” Gindling said by phone, “or we open up at the correct time.”
He said state and local governments have lacked clear leadership and largely left reopening plans up to individual businesses.
“We totally respect that everybody has their own decisions to make on this,” Gindling said. “Without centralized leadership on an issue as huge as this, you can’t expect everyone to come to the same conclusion.”
For now, he’s waiting to reopen, even though the business has been losing money for months. “The question we have is where’s the balance between fiscal responsibility and protecting your guests and community.”
Even if Boise County’s cases are low, Gindling said, nearly 98% of the resort’s 300 daily customers come from Ada County.
“For us to operate with rules that go against Ada County would be irresponsible,” he said. “We’re not willing to pretend that we live in a bubble beyond Ada County.”
But it can be easy to feel that way, said Christopher Rice, who splits his time between Boise and his cabin in Boise County.
“There’s that sense of, ‘It won’t happen to me, because we’re in the woods,’” he said by phone.
He’s gotten used to “the look” he gets when walking into a store with a mask on. He’s had to say no to invitations from neighbors to attend barbecues and picnics.
He said one neighbor told him, “But it’s all locals.” He’s not convinced. Boise County’s low numbers, he said, could be a result of the county’s low density — or just luck.
“All it takes is just one, so it’s just a roll of the dice,” he said. Still, sometimes when Rice spends a few days in a row in Boise County, he forgets.
“You wake up and you’re like, ‘What pandemic?’”
This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
