I know, the actual Gertrude Stein quote is “There's no, there there,” about her upbringing; privileged as it was, in Oakland California. Compared to Paris at the turn of the 1900's, few places in the world had a there like Paris did. A few years later we would have Eliot in a poem commenting on his buried life and Paris in the spring. Back to Gertrude! I have been thinking about that in terms of The Great Basin, and to me; with my privileged upbringing, the Great Basin is filled with there! True, its of the wide open kind but the vast expanse between Salt Lake City on the eastern edge, and Reno at the foot of the Sierra's is filled with an immense sense of there. I have also read that this basin is, after Afghanistan the second most mountainous area in the world. Not the highest peaks, but the most numerous. It includes the largest alpine lake, (Lake Tahoe), its longest river is the Bear @ 350 miles and the largest single watershed is the Humboldt river drainage of about 17,000 square miles. It also includes the lowest elevation in the nation at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park and the highest point of the contiguous United States, the summit of Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet. Within this basin there are other physiographic sections that include large sections of the Colorado River watershed, which include Las Vegas and the northwest corner of Arizona.
The watershed within this area is what is called endorheic, because if flows within the confines of the basin. In one of his reports John C. Fremont mentions about it having “No outlet to the sea.”
Lately I have been reading books about the sea and even though the sea, or ocean is much different than the desert I have grown up in, reading about one makes me think about the other. In the last couple of months I have read the classic “Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. , Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum and last but not least, re-read Lila by Robert M Pirsig, author of course of, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That book came out about the time I purchased my first BMW motorcycle and R-90S and started to think about long distance motorcycle touring.
I had a chance to experience this there, first hand during the last couple of weeks. I left on May 14th for a couple of weeks in Fresno and decided that even though most of the mountain passes over the high Sierra were closed, I wanted to go via central Nevada, rather than taking I-15 to Las Vegas and then turning off at Barstow and eventually getting to Fresno. The route I choose is about 150 miles farther than my normal route via Tioga and Yosemite, so I decided to do it in two days.
For a change, instead of going to Wendover and then heading towards Ely via 93-A, I went south from Tooele and took highway 50 toward Delta, and after that toward Ely. Its about 40 miles farther from Salt Lake City to Ely via this route, than it is going by way of Wendover, but I had not gone this way for several years. My original plan was to ride to Tonopah Nevada and spending the night there. I suddenly thought of a variation on Eliot and said to myself about a 'buried life and Tonopah in the Spring.'
It was so early by the time I got to Tonopah, that I decided to keep traveling, the bike ran the whole trip like the proverbial Swiss watch. I headed southeast from Tonopah to about 30 miles south of Goldfield and turned on to state highway 266 to Lida Nevada. I had ridden this way before back in 2005 on my way toward a short visit with my sister in Fresno and on my way to a BMW rally in Sonoma, California. If you take out the major population centers of Reno and Salt Lake City, from what I think about encompassing my traditional sense of the Great Basin, it has to have as low a population density as almost any area in the world. I thought several times about the walk Jediah Strong Smith made across this area in 1827. Peter Skene Ogden explored both the Great Salt Lake and the Humboldt River regions in the late 1820's and Benjamin Bonneville explored the northeast portion of The Great Basin in 1832. In 2004 to settle an Indian Claims case from 1951 Congress passed legislation to pay 117 million dollars to the Western Shoshone Indians for 39,000 square miles of territory.
Once I crossed into California I turned on Highway 168 which takes you over a high-mountain pass and then through a forest of Bristle Cone Pine. (Pinus longaeva) . What they call the Methuselah tree is over 5,000 years old. At Big Pine California, I opted to stop and got a motel room for the night. After a good night's sleep and some decent fried chicken for dinner, I headed south on California Highway 395 and the turnoff in Indian Wells Valley for Highway 178 for Weldon, Lake Isabella and Bakersfield. At Bakersfield I turned North on Highway 99 for the ride up through Delano, Tulare Visalia, and Hanford. I joked with my sister Kathy, that in her legal career she has had murder cases in all of those towns, and several more for the remaining distance to Fresno. It ended up being 893 miles from the City of Salt to my sister's drive-way in Fresno.
After having spent almost two weeks of nothing but reading through documents of almost every description, and also seeing evidence of man's inhumanity towards others, I was ready to once again burn daylight. Just before I left, we brought up a website showing the opening and closing dates of Tioga Pass over the last twenty five years. The Sierra's have had record snow fall this year, and it will be interesting to see when Tioga actually opens. The latest to date has been July 1st.
I had decided based on a friend who had come the other way on his BMW earlier in the week, that I would come back via Carson Pass, Highway 88. I thought of the throngs of people who headed towards the California Gold Fields via Carson Pass in 1848. When I checked road conditions on that Wednesday they advised snow-tires and chains, and had received fresh snow. By the time I left early Saturday morning May 28th there were no adverse conditions, and after turning off at Stockton I started on the road to the summit of Carson Pass. I had neglected to bring my heated gear, and just a few miles before I got to the summit of the pass, I had to stop and put on some additional layers of clothing under my riding jacket. I had the heated grips on full the whole day, and once I had the extra layer on , I felt comfy and warm, and that was how I felt, when it started to snow. It hadn't started to stick yet, and I didn't need to really slow down, but I was happy that before long I was out of the mountains (In the Mountain, there you feel free,) another line from Eliot, and heading towards Carson City. It was windy and a little chilly, and it would rain from time to time, but I decided that for the time being I would stick to my original plan of heading towards Fallon and taking Highway 50 back to Ely and then North towards Wendover on highway 93.
There's an old motorcycle adage that when you come to a junction, usually they way you had planned on going, will look more threatening, than the other direction. This proved to be the case and not wanting to get stuck in the mountains between Fallon and Ely, and there only being a few places to stay, miles apart, it getting later on in the day, and it being a holiday weekend, I decided to instead head towards I-80 and to take the slab the rest of the way home. I turned up highway 95 towards I-80 and thought that I would at least get to Elko for the night. Just passed Lovelock, it started to rain in earnest and by the time I got to Winnemucca, I was tired, wet and hungry, I hadn't eaten since breakfast in Fresno.
After a late lunch in Winnemucca of Liver and Onions, something I eat about once a year at the most, I got a motel room and tried to figure out what the weather would be like the next day. It rained the whole way home, and in addition it was much colder, I ended up layering up from head to toe, and in my sleek riding suit, with all the extra layers, I looked more like the Dough Boy, than a lean mean riding machine. I cursed myself for not having brought my heated gear, and actually stopped in Battle Mountain and bought some small gloves to wear as inserts in my summer weight gloves. Just before Carlin Nevada, there is a tunnel which in additional to being the way through a mountain, is where two tectonic plates meet. I think about the constant pressure they apply to each other, where on the surface of the earth, all appears to be relatively calm. Although below the level of the outer shell of my suit and its wonderful gortex, I remained dry, my suit was certainly heavier and my boots did a little squish when I got off the bike for the final time at home. It has been about 840 miles home via this convoluted route.
It was great to be out on the open road and I can't wait until my next opportunity to burn daylight and to use limited amounts of fossil fuels at sometimes prodigious rates of speed.
