Day 6: 19.1 miles/120 climb
Base on the numbers, you would think I had an easy day. The numbers never tell the whole story, not even close.
I waited until my bladder and boredom could take it no longer and crawled from the tent about 6:30AM. The sun was just below the horizon, but I could see from the heavy grey streaking of the sky that it would be a marginal morning, the hoped for warmth of direct sun foiled by the edges of a storm that would be leaving feet of snow in the Sierras. All night, I had slept and tossed in stillness, and my lazy morning at least was the same, but I could see lenticulars building, and the mountain range many miles away to the southeast was vanishing in the dust. It was only a matter of time before I, too, would sample the wind.
I took my time–only about 18 miles to go, after all–and walked about with coffee, finding an abandoned water trough and tank. Ah, the high Mojave, perfect cattle country. Never. These remnants of rusting dreams struck me. I thought of the man, many years ago, dreams of some cattle operation consuming his imagination until the relentless heat and dryness burned them up and set him moving on to the next big thing. This, of course, is the way of the West, and perhaps the dreams of Vegas will dry up and blow away, too, as Lake Mead drops ever lower. It was always a tenuous proposition.
After my second cup o’ Joe, I finally got packing in earnest, and just as I was about to start moving, the wind picked up, and the only people I’d seen in a day drove past in a 4x4 with pop-up camper. They waved and vanished in a cloud of dust. Into the wind, bucko.
And for several hours, it was all about the wind beating me back, not the worst I’d ever faced, and the insanely gentle almost-not downhill trend did help, and often I could average 6–7 mph on the sandy, gravely, rutted track. In fact, the amount of loose material made me glad I was headed south and not the other way. My climbing had mostly been on fairly firm surfaces if not always smooth. But this crap? Ugh.
A couple of times I just enjoyed a stroll with the bike, chewing on a bar, drinking water, enjoying the alien planet landscape of pointed peaks and thrashing creosote bushes. After a quarter mile or so, I’d saddle up and make a few miles. I KNEW the pavement wasn’t far at this point, less than five miles, but that translates into almost an hour of hard riding. Just keep moving….
At last, I could see the signs of the intersection and the pavement marking a turn away from the wind for a short distance. I whipped old Ivan, and together we broke through, Furnace Creek Wash Rd. now part of our history, known terrain and not an obscure line on a map. We’d been there.
I was buffeted and blasted as I cut down Rt. 127 towards Shoshone, and the final mile was a Battle Royale, straight into 20, 30 mph winds. But a mile wasn’t going to stop me, not this one. Whipped palms, dancing reeds along the Armargosa, the sun coming and going through the shifting grey bands, I pulled into the miniscule town and ate lunch in the ramada next to the store, a bit sheltered from the gale.
As I was finishing lunch, I noticed an older guy, scraggly beard, long johns under baggy shorts, crusty bare feet in open sandals, packing his recumbent trike and trailer. My last time through I’d been on my own recumbent trike, so I had to meet him. He said he sold his car and now uses the trike for everything, including rides to Pahrump and back for groceries–over 50 miles round trip. I couldn’t imagine he did it often—and certainly not in summer heat. Still there was. No doubt, this septuagenarian was a badass. He was a tough desert cyclist, and I liked him immediately. We talked bikes and ‘bents, and off he went.
A few supplies–never forget the date nut bread–and I was off to the RV park to get settled. After shower and laundry, which I hung on the wind shelter in my camp, I headed over to the Crowbar Café for an early dinner. There, as I demolished a massive chicken burrito, rice and beans and brews, I encountered an old guy, clean shaven, thick glasses, hunched over his own meal at the bar. Relying on a cane, he moved with slow, painful difficulty. Hard of hearing, he talked loudly with the waitress, then seemingly at me, although he didn’t turn around as I sat behind him. It took me a moment to realize it was me he was addressing. He rambled a bit, easily led astray by whatever music was playing, making random comments on the artist or some related point. He was traveling by himself, it seemed, in a gold station wagon, from Colorado, his home, no doubt to dodge the cold. He seemed a bit lonely, and I was happy to engage him. Besides music, we talked a bit of climbing–he’d done some and had a brother who climbed a lot–and even landed on Latin-American magical realism literature for a while. We both agreed that 100 Years of Solitude was one confusing book. He said he night give it another go, while I said I liked a lot of the scenes and imagery--Remedios the Beauty vanishing in a cloud of butterflies!
At last I finished my beer and jammed the last of the burrito, rice and beans down where it needed to go, and it was time for camp. I had some things to mess with on the bike, and this journal to update. I shook Mike’s hand and wished him well. His smile warmed me as I stepped out into the desert night.
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