10-3-04

Road trip

I got back last night from a 5,000 mile road trip on my ‘new’ BMW motorcycle.

I started out somewhere around 9-15-04 and headed to Red Lodge where my friend Pat lives. Pat went to Chile last winter and I wanted to touch bases with him about going down this winter. He was sleeping over at a friends house that night so I spent the night in my new tent in his yard. I got to see him in the morning and he was on his way to Alaska to see his son. He is going to Chile to see about setting up a solar energy business. In the morning I went to Roberts, MT where the motorcycle mechanic Bob Clement lives and works. I spent a couple of day and night there helping him unload furniture and we also checked out my bike for the road trip.

I took off from there around noon and made my way to Mike’s place near Dillon, MT. I helped Mike a couple of times this summer on his building project. He is building some really nice cabins that he will be renting to students that need a place to have their horses while they are in school at Western taking the equestrian program. I checked the weather map on his computer and it looked like I had better beat feet or get rained on.

The next morning I headed for Nevada and was thinking of the hot spring and how great it was going to be up to my neck in hot water in the middle of the desert.

I had great weather across the southern part of Idaho and dropped into Nevada at Jackpot. I turned west at Wells and took the freeway to Battle Mountain where I headed south. It was just getting dark when I unexpectedly found myself in a very strange situation. It was almost like riding through a kind of fog or heavy dust form. There was a strange orange glow hovering up in the air, strange flashing lights on all sides. I could see a string of on coming car lights that had some vehicles with flashing yellow lights. There must have been 40 or so vehicles on a road where it is common to meet maybe one or two cars in the 75 mile stretch of road to Austin. It was something like a twilight zone situation when I noticed people off to the side of the road scurrying around doing ???? there were hay bales along the side of the road and maybe signs that I couldn’t read on the far side of the road. I finally stopped and asked a small group of people who were along side of the road packing up gear, “what the hell’s going on?” I was told that there was a bike race that was just finishing up. 

Later I learned from Darrel Erickson that it was a bike race held to set world record bicycle speed record. The record is 81 mph, but there was no new record that day. Darrel was up there with his son Jason who was a member of the University of Nevada Reno team, several years ago, when he was a student there. They race human powered streamlined super efficient machines. The strange orange glow was a forest fire in the mountains and the fog/dust was the smoke from the fire. They do this race every year in this spot as it is the only place in the USA (world maybe?) that has a perfectly level road that is five miles long.

I made it into Austin finally without the aliens getting me and popped over the hill to the hot spring. I was so tired I just flopped my bag out and was asleep immediately. In the morning I hopped in the stock tank and regulated the temperature to ‘almost’ too hot. Wow, what a treat!

I headed back over the pass to Austin in the morning. When I got to the top of the pass I looked terrible gray and stormy on the west side so I came back to Big Smokey Valley and headed south. It was very windy and I was pushing wind all the way. Big Smokey lived up to it’s name that day and when I finally got down to Carvers Station I could see where a lot of the dust was coming from. It happened that it was Smokey Valley Days and there was a VERY dusty rodeo going on. I should have stopped, as I learned latter,  some of my friends were there.

I went on in to Tonopah and had lunch with Kenney Polman and his lady friend who just happened to be in town on their way to a party in Belmont, a historic ghost town.

From Tonopah I made it to Silver Peak and  my friend Kens place. I borrowed Kens ring of old skeleton keys that I hoped to find one that would fit my cabin in Goldfield. I forgot to take my keys before I left camp. Off to Goldfield around dark and I noticed a nice fire that someone had going at the Alkali Hot springs. This is a really nice hot spring that is handy to both Goldfield and Silver Peak.

It was nice to get into my cabin and get a fire started. I brought my new little camp stove in and had a cup of tea and enjoyed being back in my dezert camp. I noticed that my phone battery had gone dead from leaving it on. I went over to Tonopah for groceries and to see about a charger. No luck on the charger so I went the next day to Bishop to the Verizion store. They had one as well as the hook up things I needed to make it work on my bike. I also picked up a cute little Grundig Mini World radio. The radio has am, fm and several short wave bands. It is about the size of a pack of cigarettes only about ½” thick. It is amazing how well it picks up stations, especially at night.

The road over to Bishop across Gilmore and Westguard passes were just made for motorcycles. What a nice ride.