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Thanksgiving Week Sport Touring 2005 |
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Written by Daniel Hienzsch
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Wednesday, 14 May 2008 |
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Page 3 of 5
Thursday, November 24 - Thanksgiving Day
Averaging 60mph, this day was going to take a minimum of seven hours and I knew I was going to be getting to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada's in the afternoon and the sun would set especially early. As I recall 420 miles would be the longest stretch of single day riding I'd ever attempted so I wanted to make sure I gave myself as much leeway as possible. I had set the alarm in the hotel room for 6AM and man did it feel early when it went off. I looked outside and it was a bit darker than I thought it should be, but no matter. I showered and brushed my teeth and put on the "basic" cold weather gear.
For this trip I had made the effort to bring multiple layers knowing I was going to ride from high temperatures at the rims of the canyons and on the high plateaus to colder temperatures in the valleys and in the shade. I started the day decked out like this…
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Thermal shirt and pants. Very thin but insulating material that I bought at an outdoor supplier back east a while back
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Jeans
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t-shirt
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Flannel vest
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Armored riding jacket made of perforated nylon
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Armored pants
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Wind breaker
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Thinsulate lined cold weather gloves
In reserve I still had a flannel sweat shirt, my heated vest, more socks and more tshirts. I strode out looking 80% like the Michelin man and mounted up the saddle bags and tank bag, and headed out for points west.
Immediately the chill hit me. Hard. I wasn't quite ready for how cold it felt and had continued confusion as to why the sun wasn't up. I rode on, knowing I was going to have to stop in about an hour anyway to gas up and would reassess then. It's around 60 miles from Cedar City to the Utah/Nevada border and I wanted to make sure my gas tank was topped all the way up before heading into miles and miles of unending desert.
 Cold and Empty
I noticed I couldn't feel my toes exactly. Even with the gortex lined boots and a pair of socks on, the ambient temperature had nipped my toes down and it was all pins and needles from the ball of my foot forward. My hands weren't nearly as bad since I had the grip warmers turned on, but occasionally, I found myself shuddering bodily and taking a foot of the peg to shake it. I came upon a Chevron station in Caliente, NV next to some railroad tracks and decided that this would be an opportune time to get gas and warm up a bit.
I could not… stop… shivering. My arms were just a jangle as soon as I got off the bike. I filled the tank and then pushed the bake over to some parking spaces past the station. I started her up and let her idle while I fumbled through the tank bag to grab my heated vest and sweat shirt. I kept repeating to myself something I had read in a survival book when I was a kid: "Keep your core warm and your extremities will take care of themselves". I tried to take the advice to heart, stripping my layers to rebuild them. With fingers feeling thick and sluggish I plugged the vest into the powerlet socket and felt it come to life. I just stood there, in the parking lot of some forgotten gas station shivering like crazy with my body plugged into an idling motorcycle for about 20 minutes. Some distant part of my head was telling me to turn around and head back to the nearest coffee house and hole up until the sun was out, but the proper part of my brain wasn't even listening anymore. I didn't even think to top up the tank again after letting it idle for so long. I just cinched everything down, got on and kept going figuring that, as the sun came up, I'd warm up too.
Obviously, I SHOULD have stopped and headed for some place to wait until it was warm. This is clear to me now. I had started to become hypothermic at that point and wasn't thinking straight. That night, I went over what had happened and it turns out that when I set the alarm for 6AM in Utah I was actually in the Mountain Time Zone, by only a handful of miles. So while the clock said 6, the world outside said 5AM dummy. So I left an hour earlier than I thought. I also checked the weather to see how cold it had been when I left. The website said that at 7AM in Cedar City, the weather had been 15F. So, looking at a handy wind chill chart, with an ambient temperature of 15 degrees Fahrenheit and a riding speed of 60mph, the effective temperature I was riding in was -12F! The batteries in my GPS had probably frozen, killing the ability to operate and my good sense was frozen right along with them. I don't necessarily think my life was in decided danger at any point, I never felt like I was pushing it, but I can't say I was truly in my right mind. I've made it a rule since though, not to ride on days below the freezing point; on the freeway it gets too cold and in the canyons and back roads, there's a greater chance of ice.  Miles of Empty Road
In 17 miles, I crossed into the desert proper. The sun arrived and it really cheered me up. The road out there is a thin ribbon of beautiful silky black pavement, foreshortening all the way to the horizon and the day was absolutely crystal clear. There didn't seem to be a speck of dust in the air at all. I soaked up the sun like a lizard on a rock and got that uncomfortable sensation of feeling returning to one's extremities as the black Oxtar boots drank up the radiant energy. The speedo showed a reasonable rate of return, sometimes approaching the ton and with as much visibility as there was, I wasn't worried about getting surprised by anything. Hell, there were even less cars than in Utah. I looked at the clock and timed the gap between passing cars: 30 minutes elapsed. I made good time and loved the vast openness of the ride, horizon to horizon everywhere you looked, totally unblemished except for the bright black of new asphalt glistening off into the forward distance.
At one point, I looked to the north and saw a cloud of dust. NV375 is sort of an odd highway compared to what I'm used to. There is no curb, there isn't a berm, it's just pavement on desert and desert right up to the very edge of that pavement, no guardrails no nothing. There are signs that occasionally remind you that you are in open land and that there are herds of cows that will mosey unashamedly across the road. That's what I was expecting to see, a couple of cows, or maybe a guy on a quad blasting across the open desert. No, what I saw shocked the hell out of me and amazes me to this day: a herd of wild horses, about six of them if memory serves, tearing across the land looking like Kings of the High Desert. I slowed as I recognized them for what they were… trying to stop in as unsurprising a fashion as possible with every fiber of my being was screaming "Get your camera out NOW!" Our paths started converging, and I, having turned the engine off in an attempt not to spook them, coasted to a stop about 10 yards to the south east of them. Their gallop slowed and one broke from the front and looked right at me as I kept eye contact and fumbled for the zipper on the tank bag to get my camera out. Their hooves were kicking up dust as they slowed down further, leaving the course they were headed on and now heading slightly towards me, the one out in front, always looking at me. Then, a flick of it's head (I have no idea if it was a male or female) and they turned again, back on their original course, speeding up, passing across the pavement in a flurry of tan flesh and leaving me behind at a full gallop. I never got the camera out.
Back to the highway, tucked in behind the windscreen, cresting rises and staring down the straightaways. The terrain of Nevada in that area looks like ripples of rock marching across the flat of the land. The highway threads through those, linking the shallower passes in the ridgelines with 10 to 15 miles of straight line desert blacktop, then an uphill slope followed by a couple of curves through a butte, back down; repeat for 300 miles. I stopped at the summit of one butte and had a quick snack: Cliff Bars and Red Bull, took a "natural break" as they say in cycling, and continued onwards.
 NV375 - Extraterrestrial Highway
NV375 just barely skirts by Nellis Air Force Base, part of the massive Nevada Test Site. So along with the highway passing by one of the most heavily nuclear bombed places on earth, that means it also goes around Area 51, giving the highway its official nickname "The Extraterrestrial Highway". Roughly half way between the Utah border and Tonopah is a little town called Rachel that I was planning on using as my midway fuel stop. Apparently, there is quite a culture of UFO enthusiasts in Rachel that reinforce the entire Extraterrestrial highway theme of NV375, but when I got there, I was in for quite a shock.
Rachel was closed.
The entire town, such as it is, was closed up; they must have been off at whatever Thanksgiving celebrations they had planned. The gas station, not having pumps that use credit cards, was effectively abandoned and I got there with only 1/3 of a tank left. I knocked on a couple of doors and shouted a bit, but no one came to my aid and I knew at that moment that I was in for a bit of trouble. The amount of traffic on the highway had, if anything slackened compared to the "one car every 30 minutes" baseline. Even if there was a car, I had no way to siphon, no gas can, nothing.
I pulled back onto the highway and kept a very diligent 5500 rpm on the freeway. That seems to maximize my fuel consumption as best as possible. I started to become very keenly aware of the signs indicating the distance to the Tonopah, the city that I figure would be guaranteed to have a gas station since it's probably home to a large concentration of Air Force Base contractors. I would start to feel the panic rising as I thought over and over "what are you going to do, what are you going to do?," but fought it back each time by developing a clear line of thought: Running out of gas is inevitable now, you can't do anything about it, stop worrying; think very clearly about the steps you will need to accomplish when you feel the engine quit. I wished with all my heart that I had enough fuel to juuuuust stretch it the 110 miles to Tonopah, but pragmatism insisted that I was going to wind up about 30 miles short. Mile after mile I concentrated on staying calm, being prepared, listening and feeling for any sign that the engine was getting ready to hiccup and die. For some reason, at no point did I feel that sense of oppressive malevolence I had felt in the desert around Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona. I knew I was in trouble, but it didn't seem to be anything I couldn't deal with. I had food, I had warm clothing, I had a cell phone and the road wasn't 100% deserted; there were still cars. Someone would help me out.
90 miles to go, still humming along. 80 miles to go… 60 miles to go… 50 miles to go… gas gauge needle pushes into the red zone past "E"… 40 miles to go… Fuel Level warning light comes on… it's gotta happen soon. In regular conditions that means I have 10 miles to find gas. 25 miles to Tonopah… 20 miles and there it was… the little lull in engine noise and vibration, then a quick rev, a few stuttered exhaust blasts and then quiet; only the sound of air rushing around my helmet. I tucked in tight behind the windscreen and willed the bike up the incline, wanting to get someplace where I would be as visible as possible. I downshifted into neutral hoping to minimize as much friction acting on my speed as I could and coasted probably another ½ mile or so. I finally came to a stop on a slight incline nearly a mile from the crest of the butte I was ascending. I pulled off the road, and opened my bags. I stripped my armor off and get down to just regular clothing and tried pushing my bike up the incline. No luck there, the bike was too heavy and I'd just tire myself out for no reason. I made sure everything was secured on the bike and turned uphill to start walking to the crest, hoping to see some lucky surprise waiting for me. I had to take all of about two steps from the bike when a red pickup truck came around the bend and pulled over to my waving arms. Out of Gas - Not Out of Luck
I don't remember the name of my savior, I really feel bad that I don't ever write these people's names down or take a picture of them. He didn't hesitate for a moment. I made sure I had my wallet and he took me in his pickup truck the 20 miles from my bike into Tonopah. Turns out he works in the maintenance department at Nellis and was heading to visit his kids for Thanksgiving somewhere northwards on NV318. He even pointed out a little side road that led, unmarked, off of the highway into the desert; a straight bit of black pavement going to some military installation. We stopped at a gas station and I bought a gas can and filled it up, put it in the back of his truck and we headed back to my bike, which was exactly as I'd left it. He refused any form of payment for his help but gladly accepted the gas can as thanks (I had no place to really put it anyway). He said that Thanksgiving was sort of rush hour on the highway, usually there aren't that many cars! Crazy. He also said that he was surprised no snow had fallen, because by Thanksgiving it's usually blanketed out there. I suppose I'll have to keep that in mind for future endeavors in the wilderness of my neighbor state.
Whoever you are, Thanks! You helped me out of what could have been a really bad jam and I appreciate it to this day greatly. You increase my faith in the basic decency of strangers.
 Tonopah Test Range
My eyes beheld another hour of riding through desert… desert… desert. Occasionally the vast expanse of nothing broken up by a few curves through a butte or the salt flats just past Millers, NV. After all that flat, sighting real mountains was an absolute joy. Slowly but surely, the eastern flank of the White Mountains came into view and I stopped at the border to admire the lofty heights of Boundary Peak right there at the NV/CA border. I had known the day was going to be a challenge and achieving the milestone of crossing into California meant a lot to me. The GPS was showing that I was coming up on the rough 1,000 mile mark (a discounted distance since the GPS hadn't been working earlier that day due to the cold).
I pulled over at the border and just gazed up at those mountains. Somewhere up in there, lives one of the oldest creatures on earth, an Ancient Bristlecone Pine tree called "Methuselah" estimated to be 4,700 years old. The location of that tree is kept secret, but it stands in a grove of trees high in the White Mountains called the "Forest of Ancients". I'd like to go there some day.
 Salt Flat in Miller's
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 Distant Sierra Nevadas
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Soon enough, the gigantic mass of the Sierra Nevadas came into view in all their snow encased glory and I broke out in a grin knowing I was really and truly back in my home state and so very, very close to stopping for the day. I took a quick detour down to the saline banks of Mono Lake but wasn't really feeling up to negotiating a dirt road after the day I'd had so I stopped short of the shoreline, snapped some pictures and headed towards Lee Vining.
Before I got to town though, I took a moment to commemorate my goal, achieved: 1,000 official miles on the GPS. From left to right, top to bottom:
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Trip Odometer = 1000 miles
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Max Speed = 0.7 miles (I reset that statistic before taking the picture ;) )
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Moving Time = 15.06 hours
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Moving Average = 66.2 mph
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Stopped Time = 4 hours 15 minutes
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Overall Average = 51.6 mph
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Elevation = 6807 feet
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Odometer = 1000
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 My Goal
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I checked into a Best Western (again) and performed the unpack ritual. I thought about just heading to the nearest bar I could find but, dammit, it was Thanksgiving. I asked the front desk where I could get a nice meal and they suggested heading down towards June Lake to see if any of the resorts there had something going on. About 10 miles later, I pulled into the parking lot of the Double Eagle Resort and Spa, walked into the Eagles Nest Saloon and enjoyed a nice Tequila and a magnificent Thanksgiving feast. I headed back to the hotel and researched what the hell had happened to me earlier that morning and then quietly, gratefully, went to sleep.
I left at 5AM PST from Utah and arrived in Lee Vining just after 3PM, just over a 10 hour day of dedicated riding. In retrospect, I still love every moment of that day.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 February 2009 )
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