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Wednesday, June 7: Ok, kind of feel like I got the monkey off my back with today’s ride. Everything felt good. Well, let me preface that by saying “I’m not the man I used to be,” but by gosh I could ride in the heat and up a 7900 foot pass. Also on the major plus side was riding with Dave. Man, what a wonderful feeling it is to have a riding partner out here. This basin and range area of NV is a wilderness that’s just on such a massive scale. I mean hell, even the road we’re somewhat paralleling, Rt. 50, is called the Loneliest Road in America. So you can only imagine the backcountry roads. 


So we got up at a hellish 5 AM PST. Yup, we’re on Pacific time now. I worked for a while while Judy and Dave did brekkie in the lounge area. After a bit I did brekkie and then we loaded up the van for a very long drive to our drop-off point on Rt 376. Now I had planned on us going down this road a piece to pick up this Old Freight Road, and then a jaunt on FR290. But when we made the turn onto 376 we immediately saw FR001 to Pete’s Summit (no kidding). Well we decided then and there to make this thing a bit simpler by staying with 001 all the way to our meeting point with Judy today. I’m feeling a lot less confident with some of these Forest Service routes, (FR) because we’ve been seeing some of them just barley discernible as tracks. So what we’d do is do the track over the mountains, meet Judy, then drive back to the days’s start and do some berm/ATC track off the side of 376. This way we wouldn’t get out on some devilish track that just petered out into nothing. 


Rolled down 001 for five miles of gentle descending to a small swale. And it was amazing that those five miles looked like 1 from our vantage point. These basins are just so long and concave that distances are skewed in a big way. There are some hot springs at the bottom of the swale, but they looked to be a couple miles down another road, and we weren’t sure the road down there veered back to the north to take us back onto 001. So we blew that off in leu of riding an out and back route. And to be honest, damn it was just way too hot to even consider a hot spring soak. By the time we got started the temp had soared to mid 80’s. So we kept rolling. Got through the swale and there we began the climb. It was in the 6-7% range for many, many miles. As the elevation increased the temps slightly decreased. 


Dave was just riding smooth and easy. I on the other hand was doing my best to kind of keep my HR no higher than zone 3. Now the effort felt pretty good in my eyes, seeing that I hadn’t done a climb of this distance since the last time I was out here. And as I was climbing I couldn’t help but to think back to last year’s ride where I had to dismount the bike several times because I felt so shitty. So in hind’s sight I felt pretty damn skippy today. 


We must have climbed that low angle roadway for a good 10 miles. I had my altimeter on so every now and then I’d check to see how much we’d gained. Got to a point to where we could smell that wonderful scent of pine trees wafting through the air. By about 11 miles into the climb, and about 16 miles into the ride the road pitched up to areas of 8-9%. The real kicker came with about a mile to a half mile to go where the road hit a 12% grade. That little ditty took us to the top, Pete’s summit at 7900. 


Right on the side of the road was a picnic table where we parked our bikes and proceeded to munch on some goodies and gulp down water from our camelbacks. Probably hung for 20-30 minutes then began the descent, which was just as mellow as the climb. I told Dave we had a pretty good intro climb to NV, because some of the crap I’d climbed and descended last year was pretty gnarly. So this was a great first day’s climb. Tomorrow with a 8600 foot pass to surmount, that will be a bit different. 


Had a wonderful descent down to Monitor Valley, where way, way down I pointed out to Dave that the twinkling light at the bottom was most likely the sun reflecting off of the van. Took us another 15 minutes of descending to reach Judy. Popped an ice cold coke and a bunch of water, loaded our bikes and decided since 001 was such a good gravel road, we’d go back up the way we came down and shave off about 35 miles of driving from the way Judy took to get to our pick-up point. 


So we got back to the original drop point on 376. Next big decision was would we ride all the way down to where tomorrow’s drop point is or would we call it a day? Just had to get that stretch in, but the wind was blowing hard, and I do mean hard at anywhere from 25 to 40 mph! So the call was that Judy drives us down to tomorrows pick-up point and we ride back up WITH a killer tailwind. Drove the 17.5 miles down to Kingston, found a place to meet Judy tomorrow, then got out and rode gravel berm out of this little town with a couple miles of asphalt roadway, back to 376, where we had this massive gravel berm that’s as wide as a full lane on each side of the road. 


I got a kick in the ass when Dave did berminator with me. Hell, he could have easily ridden asphalt all the way back, but the dude just jumped on the berminator thing like it was second nature. There was a point with the tailwind, where in the gravel we were cruising at 23 mph! THAT is how intense the wind was blowing. Dave TT’ed well ahead of me several times, and then turned around and waited a minute or so for me to catch up. We were riding uphill for the majority of that stretch, but still were able to churn out 18+ mph for much of that uphill. Finished those 17.5 uphill miles in just over an hour. And I have to admit that at the end I was parched as hell. Had to be in the 90’s by the time we were done. 


Our total mileage for the day was 42, with a couple K’s of climbing. Drove to Austin, which will be our basecamp for the next two nights. Let me tell you, Austin is just a blip on a map. I mean this is tiny. I does have 3 motels, none of which Judy was too hip to stay in.  But hell, there town to the east of us is about 50+ miles, and to the west the next town is 100+ miles. Yes, Austin is our home for a couple of nights. We’re staying at the Pony Canyon Motel. I looks way worse from the outside than it really is. I mean hey, it’s a 70 dollar a night motel for three people. I actually think it’s a pretty good deal. We have satellite TV, great internet, two bedrooms, a frog and microwave. We’re set! Judy’s even good with the place. 


Did din din in a little cafe with decent food. Came back and I hand washed my kit in the tub then hung it all from my van. I was goofing with Dave about how he’s traveling with the Beverly Hillbillies what with my laundry methodology. Showered all the salt off my body and we’re about to watch the NBA finals. That’s it for the day. All’s good and we’ll get a real dose of climbing and riding tomorrow with two passes and 45 miles of cycling.