Weeks 53b and 54 - Nevada

I was now entering the distinctive basin and range topography, which was created by the continent stretching and pieces of the crust rising, sinking, or tilting without the support of their neighbors. This resulted in long mountain ranges running roughly north to south, with flat valleys in between. Where the crust has tilted, the mountains are gently sloped on one side and steep on the other, which I could see very clearly from the air when flying from Denver to Bozeman. From the ground, my experience of riding through these valleys was of a fairly unchanging scene, with the mountains being flattened and simplified by the haze of wildfire smoke in the air. I kept thinking about the joke video game Desert Bus, which is really boring yet requires constant attention. Funnily enough, the bus in the game travels at 45mph just like me. But after a while I made it to Wells, Nevada, where there was reportedly a nice hot spring about 12 miles out of town, straightforwardly called Twelve Mile Hot Springs. While filling up with gas and water at the gas station, I asked the attendant about the springs and he said he used to go there a lot, but that the road out to it had gotten bad over the years since he was a kid. He thought I would have no problem getting there though, and that it would be worth the trip. The first ten miles were smooth sailing on a paved road with a few sparse houses, and at the end of that road, a dirt track went off to the right. It had definitely not been graded in a very long time, and wasn't so much rutted as wavy, with tall humps every 6-8 feet that would probably strand any vehicle with normal clearance. I engaged another of Sugar's special features: the sub-transmission. The flip of a switch makes all the gears about half their usual speed, giving a lot of extra torque as long as there's no need to go faster than 25mph. And on this road there was definitely no call to go even that fast. There were two moderately deep water crossings, which I probably could have ridden through but decided to go around to spare my old engine from the effects of rapid cooling. One of them would have been impossible to go around without a motorcycle, as I had to slip between two rocks.

There was no going around the third water crossing, so I decided to pull over and camp, on a grassy little slope overlooked by shade trees, with the gurgling stream from the strings flowing by. It was one of my prettiest campsites in recent memory. As I was setting up, a guy rode by on a little green ATV and waved. I finished setting up camp, filtered some drinking water out of the stream (as the gas station water tasted pretty gross), and waded across the water toward the hot springs. When I got there, the guy had unfolded his lawn chair in the water and was relaxing with a beer, but nobody else was around. I joined him in the pool, which was a long rectangle around 50 feet by 9 feet and 3 feet deep, a very pleasant temperature, and no hint of sulfur. We started talking and it turned out he had driven an hour from where he lived in Carlin to get there, but was originally from Oregon. His hobbies included working on and racing stock cars and prospecting for gold. After a while I moved over to the other end of the spring where the hot water came out, and we sat enjoying the peaceful atmosphere as the sun went down and dragonflies buzzed overhead. Sometimes a string of bubbles rose from the gravelly bottom as if something was living down there (I suspect it might have been chemotrophic microbes). My neighbor took off to drive home, and I stayed for a little longer and then headed back to camp, very relaxed.

In the morning I threaded my way back to the paved road. Some campers had arrived in the night and unfortunately I had to rev my engine near their tent while getting my bike out of some mud. After eating breakfast at a diner in town, I met a friendly newbie trucker who had some time to fill, and gave her directions to the springs and advice about where she might be able to turn her rig around at the end of the paved road. She'd become a trucker to see the country and was currently living out of her cab, but she'd also traveled a whole lot on foot and by motorcycle in Thailand, South America, and South Africa, and had some good stories to tell. It sounded like it might be tricky to drive the truck to the springs during her mandatory rest period, but she said she'd call a more experienced friend who might know a workaround. I wished her luck and got on the road.

It was another long and boring ride, although as I approached my campsite at the Weepah Springs Wilderness, I started to notice some subtle changes. The valley floor rolled a bit more, and the sagebrush was a brighter shade of green, as if there was some water just below the surface. Then the terrain got substantially more interesting, the road turned between high rocky cliffs, and I arrived at my campsite. The rocks, broken apart and rounded by erosion, were very pretty in the sunset light, and the place had the feel of an ancient camping spot, confirmed by the petroglyphs scratched into the rusty red surfaces of the large boulders. Some were straightforwardly about hunting four-legged animals with spears, and others were more mysterious with human figures manipulating geometric objects, perhaps in some forgotten ritual? I laid out a sleeping area, then moved it after it became clear that I'd interrupted the path of some fast-moving ants. A few biting flies showed up, but moved on once it became clear that I was not a low-risk target. As the daylight faded, I realized that my solar battery had died somewhere on the ride, on account of spending so much time riding and so little time charging it. My phone's battery had run down to 10%, and there was no reception to speak of in that canyon. There wasn't much to do but shut everything down and go to bed. Of course with no human settlements for many miles, the stars were amazing in the cool, clear air.

In the morning, I found a solution to my power problem. Once all my luggage was in place, I unfolded my solar panel and strapped it to the outside so I could charge while riding. Just to be on the safe side, I memorized the few turns I'd have to take to get to the edge of Las Vegas and left my phone off for the most part. When I arrived at the edge of town, the road was at first sedate, with enormous race tracks on one side behind a sparse line of palm trees and vast networks of dirt ATV trails on the other. Then I was suddenly caught in what felt like a vast web of strip malls. The traffic became stop-and-go, and the slight stickiness that had begun developing in my throttle cable became quite annoying, although on the upside I got a lot of practice changing gears. I felt terrible for my engine, which was bathing in the heat radiating off the pavement and had to constantly idle with no airflow to cool it down. The traffic was so dense that I often had to stop at green lights behind the pileup of cars. The same big box stores seemed to repeat at regular intervals, making it feel like I wasn't making any progress. To me the best part of riding a motorcycle is being exposed to everything and feeling really present in the environment, but when that environment is unpleasant enough it can suddenly become the worst part of riding a motorcycle. When I couldn't take it anymore I pulled into the next shopping center, parked in the shade of a building, and went into the air-conditioned darkness of a very nice Thai restaurant to have some lunch and re-hydrate.

After that I felt restored enough to finish the drive down to Henderson, where my friends GM and LS live. As I approached, the commercial activity started to thin out and there were a lot more trees and other plants. The roads started to wind aimlessly in that master-plan community way which discourages non-local traffic, they were named after places in Italy, and all the houses were stucco with red tile roofs. My friends were still at work, but I pulled up outside their garage and sprawled gratefully on the grass of their shady backyard. Everything was so peaceful and green after the spareness of the desert and the hot stench and noise of town. After a bit of rest and unpacking, I took a quick trip to the store to get some fresh veggies I was craving and some milk to feed my kefir. When LS and GM got home from work, we had some dinner and caught up. I'd missed their wedding because of being on the road, so it was good to be able to spend some quality time together. GM is kind of like my cousin, and is now a professor and researcher studying links between chronobiology and exercise. His wife LS works as an occupational therapist at a hospital. They have a dog named Boone, a friendly chocolate lab with a keen interest in food of any kind (he carefully watched all cooking and eating and would happily snack on a broccoli stem). After dinner and conversation, I rolled out my bedding on the lawn and the air was so pleasantly warm that I hardly needed a blanket until temperatures dropped into the 70s in the early morning. Luckily, just as my hosts were going to bed, they remembered that the lawn sprinklers were set to start up at 6:30 in the morning and turned them off.

On Friday they went off to work and I spent the day working in the backyard, periodically moving to get out of the sun. Although the day got up to around 100 degrees, I found it very tolerable in the shade, especially with the humidity below 30%. On Saturday when we all drove up to Mount Charleston for a hike, the brisk mountain air was even nicer, the ancient twisted pine trees gave off a fine scent, and the views were spectacular. On the way back, we skipped the well-loved restaurant at the top of the mountain and went to a smoothie place in the valley instead, which was too bad because that restaurant burned down a week or so later! On Sunday morning, LS went to work, GM went out bicycling, and I finally got down to doing some maintenance on Sugar, digging into the pile of parts I'd ordered from the road as I noticed things that were broken. I replaced the front brake lever which I'd broken by dropping the bike while trying to park it on gravel in Idaho (and temporarily fixed by turning the useless rear brake lever upside down and switching it to the other side). Then I replaced the old selenium rectifier with a modern silicon one and the lead-acid battery with a lithium-ion one. I lubricated the sticky throttle cable by making a funnel out of tape and pouring engine oil through it, which worked better than I'd expected. I installed a new chain to replace the stretched one that came with the bike. There was only one real issue left, which was the oil leak, but fixing it was going to involve digging into the guts of the engine in a way I'd never done before, so I was hesitant to start on it for fear of breaking something.

When LS got back from work, we went out on the town. Dinner was at an amazing vegan sushi restaurant, where they didn't try to imitate fish but instead used vegetables and tofu in really creative ways. One menu item listed "suspense" as one of the ingredients, and when we asked about it our server said they put a piece of ghost pepper into the sushi roll so that it winds up in one of the six pieces, but it's impossible to tell which one. Given that there were only three of us (and one with a low spice tolerance at that), we decided our odds were not so good and ordered something else. But everything was unique and delicious and we left with a solid food buzz. Then we went to the Rio Theater, where I'd gotten us tickets to Penn and Teller's show. I'm a big fan, and had watched all but the most recent season of their TV show Fool Us, so I expected to see mostly material I'd seen before. But it turned out that because of pandemic restrictions they'd been unable to perform for over a year, and against the advice of their friends who said they'd be rusty and should stick to old tricks they knew in their sleep, they'd instead spent their downtime developing a whole lot of new material. They were also palpably excited to be in their first few weeks of performing live again, and it was a special experience to be there. The show finished with a display of fire-eating and an intimate firelight talk about the value of not pretending to understand the trick and just letting mystery exist in the world. As Penn explained, there actually isn't really a trick to fire-eating, and we could all hear him curse when he burned his mouth at one point. But that's my favorite thing about Penn and Teller: they go beyond magic as an entertainment and use it as a lens to call our approach to reality into question.

In the next few evenings, I overcame my anxiety about breaking something and dug into Sugar's engine. I drained the oil, pulled off the left crankcase cover, and took apart the sub transmission. Then it turned out I had to cut out a large and intricate gasket to replace the one I'd removed, because neither of the two kits I'd ordered matched my exact model. This took me three tries, but I think I learned most of the things not to do when cutting a gasket. And it was kind of fun in a crafty way, kind of like a hybrid between my mechanical and graphic arts skills. At the end I had a gasket that was far superior to the handmade one I'd taken out, which had partly covered up a lot of internal oil channels and had some cursive letters written across the material which I eventually figured out spelled "asbestos"! And while I was in there, I found that a piece of the cam chain tensioner hadn't been properly installed and corrected that. Eventually it all went back together, I filled it with oil, and to my great relief it started up and ran as well as before. On Wednesday morning, GM and LS took off for a family trip to the Grand Canyon and Sedona, and Boone went to a stay at a friend's house, so I had the place to myself for a few more days to complete repairs and organize my gear. By Saturday morning I felt I'd topped up on fresh veggies, become a slightly better mechanic, and was ready to get back on the road!

Things I Learned

• It's really hard to keep kefir grains healthy when crossing a desert. It turned out that after so many days in the extreme heat and agitation of my saddlebag, they had over-fermented and produced too much acid, which then injured their bacterial component. So I let go of my kefir culture, which had the upside of freeing some space in my luggage for the new tools I'd bought.
• You can buy a car from a vending machine. We passed one next to the highway and there they were, lined up behind glass like huge candy bars. We tried to imagine the circumstances where someone would do this, but I guess it's all part of living in the future.
• The continental divide is complicated! I thought there was only one and it sort of went down the middle of the continent, but actually it branches a whole lot and even circles around the great basin, or really the great basins since there are many of them, and some of the boundaries aren't even clear enough to draw a line and we just kind of make one up. I guess this makes sense when I think of how smaller watersheds are shaped, and the basins being a bit like huge dry puddles or ponds which the water can never get high enough to spill out of.

Wonderful Things

• Mountain ranges with whorled and twisted textures like the exposed wood grain of a massive dead tree. Being out west makes me wish I knew more geology.
• Landscaping with all sorts of interesting desert plants I don't know the names of. Some of them were in bloom and put wonderful exotic scents on the breeze.
• Waking up to see the sunrise, and with no temptation to snooze since the sprinklers are about to come on!