Mudgy & Millie Bronze Moose Trail

The story

In 2008, Susan Nipp—the local Coeur d'Alene author best known for co-creating the ubiquitous Wee Sing children's music series—looked at Boston's famous Make Way for Ducklings bronzes and decided her home town needed its own piece of interactive public storytelling. She wrote a book about a bumbling moose named Mudgy searching all over downtown Coeur d'Alene for his friend Millie the mouse, completely unaware that Millie is sitting inside his own antlers the entire time. To pull the story off the page and onto the pavement, she teamed up with the city and local artist Terry Lee, who cast five life-size bronze Mudgy-and-Millie statues to anchor a 2.25-mile route through town.

What makes the trail genuinely odd isn't just the sheer civic commitment to a hide-and-seek punchline rendered in heavy bronze; it's how deeply embedded this private book project became in municipal infrastructure. Built as a fundraising engine for the Coeur d'Alene Public Library Foundation, the project has funneled tens of thousands of dollars into local literacy programs through book and merchandise sales. Terry Lee gave Mudgy a heavy, goofy, solid-bronze bulk specifically engineered for people—kids and adults who think no one is looking—to climb on, touch, and photograph.