We stopped at a nice roadside rest area at Summer Lake two hours later. Here I got a good sense of the quiet I had missed out on at Camp Hunker Down. There was no distant highway noise. We left the next morning eventually turning east onto Highway 299 which would take us over the Warner Mountains at Cedar Pass (6035 feet). When we hit the five thousand foot elevation marker Beans began to howl. I assumed the change in air pressure was affecting her ears and she was none too happy about it. When we arrived in the tiny town of Cedarville, California she was over it and just wanted to get out and stretch her legs. I found a little grassy park for her to do just that. After a failed attempt to find some Bud Light Cheladas in the two small stores in town I settled for some of Mikes Hard Lemonade and we left California crossing over into Nevada. Two hours later we arrived onto the playa at the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach. This was never in the long term plan. In fact when I was last there years ago I felt I was done with the Black Rock having been out there dozens of times since the 1990’s and thought I probably would never return. But sitting in Camp Hunker Down all summer trying to figure what to do and where to go I thought of travelling this direction as a change (it would be a shorter route too) plus Beans had never been on the playa. Looking at some pictures of Sinbad on the playa I thought I ought to at least once give Beans that experience.
The Black Rock Desert
We arrived an hour past tea time and I drove out onto the playa about four miles and turned off the motor. As always, I was immediately struck with the absolute silence and solitude of the playa. It is a huge dry lake approximately twenty-seven miles long and ten miles wide. It was good to be back and Beans wasn’t too sure what to make of it. There are no trees, no rocks and no animal life at all on this alien landscape. I let her out without harness or leash on. There was no need. She roamed around the RV, sat and stared out into the nothingness and eventually came back inside. The next day the smoke had blown in from the fires in the Lake Tahoe area to the west obscuring the mountains surrounding the playa. Beans by now was used to the billiard table flat dry cracked alkali lake bed. She’d run in and run back out of the RV. By the third morning she was romping about outside, doing mock attacks at me with her back arched and tail all fluffed up then run off prancing about. Wee...I’m free! When outside she would most always stay in the shade of the RV or underneath, the sun being too hot on her dark fur. But when the sun went down she would decide to go off on a walkabout. I had to walk on out after her for a hundred yards or so and bring her back. She must have been thinking there must be something around here to hunt…somewhere. From then on when the sun went down I kept the screen door shut. One time she decided to go off on a long adventure. I hollered at her “Beans! Come home.” She stopped, looked back at me then continued on her journey. “Beans! Want some treats?” Boy when she heard the word ‘treats’ she turned around and hauled ass back to the RV at full speed. So cute.
I wanted to go visit Trego Hot Springs situated on the east “shoreline” about ten miles distant. I just wanted to see how things had changed over the years. But since the smoke blew in I couldn’t see the mountains which were only a few miles distant. This was unnerving. With the hot springs ten miles away and I couldn’t see mountains only a few miles away, how on earth was I going to find the RV, a fly speck on the horizon, on my return trip? Being unable to locate camp was scary. I could choose to give in to my fear and not visit the hot springs, or go for it. Sometimes when you are on an adventure you have to take chances or it wouldn’t be a real adventure would it? I put fresh batteries in my GPS device. I marked our camp on MAPS in my iPhone. And I took a compass. I would leave heading eighty degrees NE. In ten miles I should be within sight of the cell tower relay at the train track crossing where the springs sat on the other side. This meant I needed to return ten miles heading two hundred sixty degrees SW. Picture traveling in a white out of a blizzard or in a dense fog with nothing to use as reference points. That was how the conditions were for visibility. With extra water on board I took off on the Honda. Now, just as long as the Gracie didn’t breakdown; this would mean a very long walk. I found the hot springs fairly easily. I had been there numerous times over the years so that wasn’t difficult once the raised ground level of the train tracks came into view. I found things had changed. Fencing was up all around done by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) and informational signs here and there were all something new. Some were warning signs about the springs being contaminated water (gee, I had been going into them for over twenty years) and the water runoff was now being diverted for some unknown reason leaving the canal virtually dry and weed filled. I came, I saw and I probably would never return. Thankfully I have my memories of a better place years ago. Now to find my way back home. After eight miles heading in the right direction by instinct mostly I saw a tiny dot on the horizon two miles away. I did it. Yes, by most standards it wasn’t the wisest thing to do being alone. Getting lost, having a breakdown or getting hurt, any or all could very well have happened. Getting lost wasn’t too much of an issue. I knew my way around the area very well after many years. Just the visibility factor was a concern. The little Honda 90 has proved itself to be very reliable, but it is a machine and things can go wrong. As for getting hurt, I try to ride safe and slow taking no chances. In the end it was exhilarating. If you don’t live life on the edge, you’re not living. Incidentally, the playa has been the site in the past for several land speed record attempts. On the way back I set a new land speed record for Gracie–40 miles per hour.
The Black Rock Desert playa is the home of the annual week long Burning Man art festival event held the week proceeding Labor Day weekend in September. I used to go every year after I first discovered it by chance back in 1995 while camping out on the playa. I went fifteen times then in 2010 stopped going. With seventy thousand people in attendance it had just got to be too much. This year due to COVID-19 the event had been cancelled. I thought I would ride over to the location of what is known as Black Rock City. I just wanted to be there and see where I had a lot of great times and memories. I wasn’t too surprised to find a few dozen camps scattered about in the area. I talked with some of the people and learned that during THE week when the event was supposed to be, around a thousand or so people had showed up despite warnings online by the sheriff’s department and the BLM rangers as to not come out there. I learned they even set up a few streets unlike the massive city set up normally. So I thought that pretty cool and no doubt everyone had a great time with the gathering being so much smaller and intimate, just like back when I discovered it in ’95. I was told the BLM rangers even showed up and despite warnings online they were receptive and just advise everyone to be safe and keep it clean. I was visiting a small group at a music van playing techno music. After telling them about the good old days they invited me to come back that night for a big party.
“Oh that’s past this old man’s bedtime” I said.
The guy replied “You’re not that old.”
“Oh yeah? How old do you think I am” I asked.
He asked me to take off my glasses and I did. He studied me. “Fifty two.”
Ha! I would be seventy two in two months I informed him. Yep, he made my day, in fact he made the highlight of 2020 for me. I thought about that the remainder of the day. From now on I would look upon myself as being twenty years younger than I actually was. Yeah, I liked that idea.
On the fifth day of being camped on the playa the smoke issue was the worst. Satellite imagery online showed the smoke stretching all the way across the country up into Michigan. We were situated along the fringe of the smoke cloud. I knew all those to the west had it many times worse and wondered how they could live in that. My eyes began to get watery and my nose and throat burned. To the south where I planned to travel severe air quality warnings were issued with visibility less than a mile on the highway through Fernley, Yerington and Hawthorne. The only route was eastward on Interstate 80 which looped up to the northeast away from our ultimate goal for the winter, Arizona. We just had to sit it out and hope for some winds out of the east to blow the smoke back into California. On the sixth day I moved camp a few miles over close to the west “shoreline” just to have something to look at.
On a good note I discovered why the inverter would scream at me when using the laptops. It was not as I had thought−insufficient sun on the solar panels. The two wires from the inverter to the batteries have large clamps that just latch onto the posts of the battery. One clamp was attached to a nut which had a bit of rust and acid corrosion buildup and the nut on the post itself was a bit loose. I cleaned the connection, sprayed some contact cleaner and wiggled both clamps back and forth for a good bite. Problem solved. My goodness, how long had I been dealing with that?
We left the next morning heading south to Fernely an hour and a half drive. There in town the smoke was much worse. First stop was a car wash to get all that nasty alkali dust from the playa off the RV and the motorbike. That stuff is bad and will eat at the metal if left on. I felt good after cleaning everything then drove over to a nearby Raley’s grocery store where I successfully forgot to buy several items despite having a list. I then tried to track down some Bud Light Chelada beer with no luck. We left Fernley heading south towards Yerington an hour away into ever increasing thick smoke. The Weather Channel alerts were not fooling. Visibility was less than a mile and the air quality was so bad I resorted to wearing my COVID-19 bandana while driving which seemed to help or I just imagined it did. Our overnight spot in Yerington was an abandoned outdoor drive-in movie theatre just outside of town. That was a fun experience saying to friends and the RV travel site I posted on with photo, “We’re just sitting here waiting for the movie to start but if the smoke gets any worse I won’t be able to see the screen”. I received some fire and smoke information from a friend who included a link to a site where it showed just as he wrote−I had picked the worst spot in Nevada to go to. Figures. I found if I stayed inside and kept all the windows shut it wasn’t too bad at irritating my eyes and throat. The next morning I woke to the sight of clouds in a blue sky. Glory be!
I was in no hurry to move on and even took the time to make another pasta salad for later. Beans stayed in bed and then became a bit grumpy when we got rolling. I stopped at a rest area on the other side of town so she could get out and feel green grass under her paws. There was one other car there and she was having none of it. She wanted back inside. I felt bad for her. My fault. We had been isolated for so long she had lost being comfortable around people.
Our next stop to camp would be at Walker Lake. I had driven by this large lake several times over the years but never stayed. There was a State Beach which I read cost money to stay at but a few miles further on was a free area, Tamarack Cove. I allowed people riding my butt pressure me into overshooting the turnoff where I grumbled on for another mile before finding a place to a pull over where I could turn back around. I found a somewhat level spot down the slope from what used to be a campground from long ago with several deteriorating asphalt parking pads. I felt this spot would do to get us through the weekend. I took a walk down to the shoreline and discovered pretty much a dying lake. It stunk, the water didn’t look inviting to get into for a swim and the ebb tide was coated with brine flies. The next day a guy with two dogs pulled in with a beat up old SUV pulling an equally beat up travel trailer. The trailer was called a Hi Low which I had never seen one before. The top half collapsed down to create a low profile while on the road. He would be our only neighbor far enough away that it wasn’t an issue. As the weekend crawled on the place grew bleaker with each passing day but at least the smoke was gone and there were lizards abundant to entertain Beans.
We pulled out Monday morning for a short drive to the town of Hawthorne (home of the world’s largest Army ammo depot) to the south a dozen or so miles. There I topped off the fuel tank for the next services weren’t to be had for one hundred miles at Tonopah. I picked up a few items at Family Dollar, then over to Raley’s for some produce and lastly two gallons of purified drinking water at the first water machine I had seen in months. We passed on through a seemingly deserted town with barely a car to be seen on the four lane wide main street. I stopped at the only liquor in my continuing quest to find some Bud Light Chelada beer. Only the big twenty-four ounce cans were to be had. I settled for another six-pack of Mikes Hard Lemonade. At the register I pulled out my debit card where the older lady said “We don’t take plastic. Cash only.” I was stunned. I couldn’t recall ever entering a store that didn’t take debit or credit cards. I loved it! It was like stepping back into time when things were so much simpler. I went back to the RV for some cash and complimented the lady for providing me with the highlight of my day. I stood in the still empty of traffic Main Street to get a photo of Clark’s Liquor Store. This was most blog worthy.
Miller’s Rest Area, Tonopah and Beyond
We then set out for Tonopah passing through some of the most desolate land this country has to offer. Several times I reflected back upon my good fortune in having my time-bomb tires exchanged for a new set before leaving Sisters. The first potential stay over site was Miller’s Rest Area fifteen miles north of Tonopah. I pulled in and found a nice large parking area away from the main rest area which had green grass, water and restrooms. The large flat dirt parking area was posted NO SEMI’S (that was nice) and STAY LIMIT 18 HOURS. I parked at the end of a line of picnic tables stepped out and discovered a high pressure water source right by us. How convenient. This would do for a day or maybe I would push it and stay longer. After getting settled and letting Beans out to stalk birds at the dripping faucet I relaxed for the rest of the day. It was quiet and what little traffic that passed by on the nearby highway wasn’t bothersome at all. That night only two big RVs parked out in the large flat area. One was a couple from Montana. He drove the big coach which was pulling a large cargo trailer. She was driving a big GMC pick-up truck which was towing a large cabin cruiser boat. I like my simple life. The other coach was from Oregon. The old guy hooked up his power washer and gave his RV a complete hose down. I just watched and wondered. The next morning his wife got out and proceeded to gather up all the windblown trash in our immediate area. She was at it for nearly an hour stooping over picking up litter ultimately filling two large black plastic bags in addition to dragging several large pieces of debris over to the trash cans. My back would be killing me after all that bending over. She needed a pair of grabber tongs. At any rate, bless her heart. The next morning I walked around the rest area and saw the same homeless looking guy I saw when we first pulled in. He was pushing his tricycle which had a long trailer attached carrying all of his worldly possessions. The best way to describe this guy was imagine a dirty old grizzled prospector from the old west and that was him. No doubt he had an interesting story but I could tell he didn’t want to be pestered. Neither would I. I just wondered how he ended up here. Coming down from the north that was a long one hundred miles of nothingness he traversed. And if he was heading north…well I didn’t even want to think about it. All I can say it is people like him who are the survivors and will do okay when the shit hits the fan later on. Back home I decided to look and see what was ahead of us for places to stay and then I checked the weather. Everywhere south of us was to be in the mid-nineties and above. Well now what? Usually by the last week of September temperatures settled down to the comfort zone of the eighties. In the past I most always arrived in Quartzite, Arizona around this time. This year it was still over 100 degrees daily there. All we could do was stay at Miller’s Rest Area until things simmered down or we got run out.
During the day there wasn’t much of anything to do. People may wonder how I could sit in one place doing the same old thing everyday or even nothing at all. If I were in my sticks and bricks house back in Santa Rosa, California I would be doing the same old thing every day and worse still, probably resort to watching television. In this life I am always free to move on to a new location and do whatever. One evening lying in bed I realized that having the high pressure water faucet next to us I could get out there at the picnic table and really give that carpet with the cat puke stain a good cleaning and scrub without being concerned about water. And so the next morning I did just that. It went well so I grabbed the other two dirty carpets and cleaned them as well. This led to sweeping out the floors and then wiping them down with Clorox wipes. I was on a roll now. I wiped down all the cabinetry next. Things were looking good and I noticed places that needed extra attention. The next day I attacked the dirt caked on places where Beans rubbed up against and where her dirty old dad rested his arms on the edges of the table and countertops. The next day was trying to clean up the cab area of all the accumulated dust on the dash and doors. Every day something else got cleaned. Things were looking good and I felt good about our home.
One day while sitting inside eating lunch after a cleaning session a guy pulled in next to the RV in his Toyota passenger car. He had come in from Benton, CA. to the west and didn’t realize he was heading into a wilderness of nothing. We was running on fumes, nearly out of gas and wanted to know how far it was into Tonopah. I told him I thought about fifteen miles. He didn’t think he could make it and wondered if I had any gas. I told him I had a gallon I could give him. I went outside to get the gas can for the Honda and discovered it was empty. I think the guy panicked a bit when I held up the empty can. “Wait, there is some on the bike” and I took off the spare fuel can on the Honda telling him that it held about eight tenths of a gallon. He was happy and stuck out his hand to introduce himself. “I’m Jay.” I looked at his hand and said without even thinking “Nah, COVID thing” and didn’t return the handshake. He was fine with that. I never was keen on handshakes anyways being the somewhat low level germaphobe that I am after my pneumonia episode eleven years back. I sent him on his way and thought about that. “Well, that’s one good thing about this COVID-19 business. I can work that to my benefit.” And with a smile I finished my lunch.
A week later and we were still at the eighteen hour limited stay Miller Rest Area. No one cared. No one bothered us, except for the nightly bunch of travelers who would pull in each evening in their monster rigs and run their generators so they could watch television. Tricycle guy was still around but at the end of the week he had moved out from the shade of the trees, covered picnic tables and the cool lush green grass of the rest stop. He now was out in the middle of the desert, sitting in the dirt all day long with no shade, not even a hat. What a tough old buzzard. On the morning we left the old guy who had moved back to the shade and comfort of the shady rest area.
We drove the fifteen miles south to the town of Tonopah. There I filled up the empty gas cans for the next traveler who would come by misjudging the distance to the next service station. We stopped at Family Dollar on the south edge of town, one of these most rundown Family Dollar stores I had ever been in. Then next door to Raley’s to pick up a few items but no milk. Yep, I had forgotten to put milk on the list and I left without any. In the parking lot a woman from Oregon rolled up in a beat up old Toyota pickup painted primer gray. In the small bed she had everything she owned piled in and cinched down with straps. I was still in the RV when she returned and I had to go meet her. When she headed off to the store, leaving the windows down in the cab, she stepped right on out which made me think she was in her thirties or forties. I was surprised to see she was a crusty old woman maybe close to my age. I wanted to know if she was camping or moving. She said a little bit of both. I shared with her that I was asking since I had been helping a friend in Tennessee to escape an abusive situation with her husband but she feared the unknown of going out a solo female traveler. The woman knew all too well what I meant somewhat indicating that she too was a refugee from a “situation”. She mentioned she was traveling with her cat. “Oh, me too” I replied. “Where is he?” Her black panther kitty had been sitting on the back of the truck seat all that time while she was in the store. The cat had on a harness and leash but was just fine sitting there waiting in the cab with the windows down. Now I understood why it looked like she was talking to someone before she left for the store.
We drove south on Highway 95 for twenty-four miles to a turnoff for Gemfield on a tip I received for a place to boondock. The well graded dirt road led up into the mountains for three and a half miles where I finally came upon an information sign and picnic table. The gemstone fields was privately leased from the BLM but they allowed people to come and collect rocks then pay a dollar a pound for the rocks they took, all on the honor system leaving money in a metal box. I jogged around up and down a few branching roads and finally found a site that was somewhat level and would work for a stay. But I was bothered by something. I had come down a short rocky slope on the way into the area and now it was working on me. Would The Little House on the Highway be able to climb up that slope on the way out? We settled in at our site and I took Beans out for her exploratory inspection. Later in the afternoon as I lay there on the bed trying to read I couldn’t get the rocky slope out of my mind. There was only one way to deal with this and maybe get a good night’s rest–take Gracie down and ride back there and check it out. So I unloaded the bike, put on a few more clothes and rode the mile and a half back. It looked doable especially with a little bit of a running start. I felt better…kind of. I rode around a little bit more and returned to the RV. That evening I just didn’t feel good about being there. It was extremely remote without anyone else around for miles. If I were to ride the motorbike all around exploring I just wouldn’t feel comfortable in the event an accident happened. I couldn’t do it. I decided I would leave the next morning removing the temptation. Then to make matters worse besides having no milk (I did have my Dollar Tree long shelf life boxes of milk), a rocky upgraded to negotiate when we leave, not being able to ride the Honda around, I realized that the propane tank was running low. I should have filled it up several towns ago knowing I was to be driving through hundreds of desert miles with no towns. Great planning.
The next morning I walked down the hill to the information board and “weigh station”−a bathroom scale sitting on a distressed sheet of plywood. I just wanted to clean the place up a little. There wasn’t much trash but there were boards and such scattered about which had the appearance to have been a little outhouse at one time. I gathered all this up into a nice stack of lumber. There was a metal shelf lying in the dirt. On it was written WEIGH STATION and directions to sign in and deposit money in a metal mailbox all in a faded felt tip pen. I rewrote everything with a fresh felt-tip and then secured the shelf sign standing upright and wired it to a metal pipe. Everything now looked much nicer and made me feel good. I enjoyed doing things like that, especially when no one is around.
Back at camp I went to load up Gracie. I have to back her up the ramp so she fits past the spare tire. It is hard to do as me having only spaghetti arm muscles. The ground was a bit soft and had a slight slope to it, a slope going the wrong way. I tried three times and just couldn’t get the bike up onto the rack. I ended up backing the RV down to firmer and more level ground where I was finally able to load the bike. It was going to be a sad day when I discovered myself to be too old and weak to load up that motorcycle by myself. I wondered what I would do when that day came. With the bike now loaded and everything else put up we were ready for our escape. At the much dreaded rocky upslope The Little House on the Highway did well. In fact I became more concerned of tipping over into a deep ravine running alongside the road since it was off camber and I was rolling over rock causing the RV to rock side to side. “We made it Beans!”
We drove the few remaining miles into the little desert town of Goldfield. They had a newly built visitor center with a nice paved parking area and I wheeled on in. The nice lady inside confirmed what I already suspected; there was nowhere to buy propane. It looked like that would have to wait until we reached Pahrump, Nevada, 130 miles to the south. I calculated we would be good for about a week to ten days before running out. So doing 130 miles doesn’t seem far in time but it was hot in the mid-nineties and on into the hundreds everywhere south from Goldfield. I didn’t want to get into that if at all possible. We hung out in Goldfield for the day, population 270, caught up the blog and the journal for the next eBook and then spent the night in the visitor center parking lot.
The next morning I decided to call the propane distribution office I saw as we passed through Tonopah, just to see. Talking with the nice lady she said they could indeed fill RV propane tanks at their place of business. Wow, that was wonderful news. I told her I’d be there in an hour and promptly secured things for the twenty-five mile drive back up north. That would be worth it for now we could stay in the cooler climate for a longer period. At the office in Tonopah there it was, a propane filling station I never saw when we rolled through town days earlier. The guy was waiting for me sitting there in his truck. Much relived and with a full tank of propane I drove back south and decided to check out a boondocking opportunity along a dirt side road on the south edge of town. I had seen it listed on freecampsites.net but hadn’t paid any attention to staying there. I drove along the dirt road and passed a few campers parked along the way. Continuing on the road it narrowed to a one lane and as I crested a rise I could see the road stretching off into the distance across the Nevada desert. I saw no more campers and it appeared to be nowhere wide enough to turn around. I thought best to stop there and back on out a quarter mile to the first wide spot where I could get turned around. I pulled off to the side just before reaching the highway and parked. Time for lunch. As I ate and still on a high with my newfound propane I realized this wasn’t a bad spot. It was quiet except for the very light traffic flow some distance away, there was good cell signal (a huge collection of towers and dishes stood on the hilltop to the west) and I was within walking distance to the Raley’s grocery store and the worn out Family Dollar I had stopped at earlier. Why move on? And so we stayed right