May 30, 2005
Day 13: Tonopah to Reveille Range
Motels - as usual - mean a late start, but I needed this one. I called my sister to wish her a "Happy Birthday" and celebrated by own fifteenth anniversary. Man, I'm just lucky to be alive - headwind or tailwind.
I rode up Main Street and stopped to photograph the Mizpah Hotel. It's been closed for most of the past decade and speaks of the situation that Tonopah and other small Nevada towns face. Nevada is a giant doughnut with Vegas and Reno on the edges and nothing in the middle. The few jobs there are around Tonopah are with federal agencies and the folks around here hate the federal government. Go figure.
I went by the grocery store to stock up. There's gonna be a lot of sagebrush ahead. I also bought a gallon of water and stood at the highway junction with a sign asking someone to drop it off at Warm Springs. I knew from previous trips that there's no water for a hundred miles. Actually there is if there's an emergency. You can always go off the road to a ranch house, but these are few and far between. Finally, a guy in a truck stopped. He knew exactly where I wanted him to stash it and agreed that this was a good idea.
Then I took off on an incredible ride across central Nevada. The weather was just perfect. Blue skies, gumdrop clouds, and the greenest hills I've ever seen in the Nevada desert.
I have always loved riding past the sign for Toiyabe National Forest because there are no trees anywhere to be seen. There is one tree further up the hill. I stopped to hike out to it and discovered a muddy spring, some old adobe ruins, and a zillion rusting cans.
The ride down from the summit was magical. It was the most glorious emptiness one could imagine with jumbled mountain chains stretching in every direction.
At Warm Springs, my water cache was just where I had asked. Like Coaldale, the bar and pools have been long closed. The main pool still sits next to the shuttered saloon, teal green and inviting. There's a big "No Trespassing" sign, but there's an even bigger hole in the chain-link fence. I couldn't resist.
Feeling reinvigorated, I got dressed, licked my index finger, and determined that the wind was coming out of the northeast again. I decided to change my route rather than fight the wind and headed east on the Extraterrestial Highway. The Railroad Valley was covered in yellow wildflowers. I rode on and on in the evening light. Not a car. Just a rare, green valley, primeval mountains, and the smell of sagebrush.
Today's ride: 70 miles (113 km)
Total: 666 miles (1,072 km)
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