9. Nevada

Collecting my spare parts and tools in Carson City, I was able to observe the customs of riders here.  For many, their bike was an art form, richly decorated and having American flags flying from the rear.  They spend Saturday afternoon cruising up an down highway 395 hair flying in the wind (helmets are not compulsory in Nevada) and waving to other bikers.

East of Carson City I had my first experience of off-road riding along the dirt trails of the original route and spent the night alongside the Carson river  near Fort Churchill

The ruins of Fort Churchill, built after the Paiute War to control the tribes.

The next day I continued through empty scrub and desert but the directions in my guide book were vague and I was soon lost in deep sand forced to push with both feet and raise my body off the saddle to let the bike make progress forward.  Finding the edge of a bombing range I followed the fence until I came across a trail and could make my way to the highway and on to the town of Fallon.  I considered I had been taught a lesson the easy way.  If I tried to cross the next, much longer stretch of open desert without adequate maps and directions I could easily get into deep trouble as the roads here were very few and far between.

Lost in the desert

Fallon is now the home of the U.S. Navy “Top Gun” fighter training school.  The jets zoomed overhead and in the evening I cruised the bars and casinos (gambling is legal in Nevada) looking for Tom Cruise or Kelly McGillis but could only find mesmerized robots putting notes in whirring machines.

I continued along highway 50 as this was the original Pony route- it crossed lifeless alkali flats followed by craggy scorched mountains.  I turned off to visit the ruins of Cold Springs and then Sand Springs station near a huge natural sand dune.  The explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Burton had traveled this route in 1860 and described the living situation of the keepers:

The low rock structure on the left - the Second Springs station.

“Sand Springs deserved its name… the land is cumbered here and there with drifted ridges of the finest sand, sometimes 200 feet high and shifting before every gale.  Behind the house stood a mound shaped like the contents of an hour glass… The water near this vile hole was thick and stale with sulphury salts: it blistered even the hands.  The station house was no unfit object in such a scene, roofless and chairless, filthy and squalid, with a smoky fire in one corner, and a table in the center of an impure floor, the walls open to every wind, and the interior full of dust.  Of the employees, all loitered and sauntered about desoeuvre’s as cretins, except one, who lay on the ground crippled apparently dying by the fall of a horse upon his breast bone.”