9-12-15 Saturday.

We ended up getting a late start from the luxurious KOA, we took full advantage of the showers and a nice dry morning to access our plan for the day. We took some time to go over the bikes, adjusted and lubed chains and the boys pulled their air filters which were a huge mess. Fortunately they installed foam pre-filters that were easily cleaned in the outdoor sink provided for camp dish washing. Finally packed up we rode into town for a hearty breakfast and were on the road about 11:30, The road out of ELY was more of the same, hot, and dusty but we were having fun.

Eventually we came to a sign for the Old Lincoln Highway, interesting, this sign was pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

According to the GPS track we would be riding on this historic route…. hmmm, looked like a couple of sandy ruts to me…..

We spent a lot of time stopping to open and close gates.

The dust was so bad we tried to space out for what was probably almost a mile.

Great long stretches of riding, we rode fast to blast through the sandy stretches hitting most of them about 50mph..

Well, finally it had to be my turn….. I hit this section of rutty sand WAY to fast…

This was the result….

Crash #1 for me, but it wouldn’t be my last. The boys were way ahead of me in a cloud of dust so I rested for a few minutes, dusted myself off and was getting ready to ride when the two KTMs came over a hill to check on me. Good kids… checking on the old guy.

After verifying I was OK, we all had a good laugh, both Jon and Weston had their first crash in, so much for my no-hitter…

I slid for what seemed like 20 feet in the silt and dust was thick over every inch of me and my bike.

I found out later that I had a little road rash and a sprained thumb…. no big deal.

We were getting pretty late into the day after our late start but I decided to slow my pace a little. As the sun was getting lower the sky was an eerie color. There was a lot of smoke in the air from Washington and Oregon fires. Between the smoke and some clouds we had a great sunset, you can see the dust cloud in the distance of my riding companions…

Was it me or were we about to loose our sunlight?

Ha, pretty much YES. Soon we were riding in complete darkness following our GPS tracks into the city of Battle Mountain. Little did we know that the last few miles into Battle Mountain is the location of the fabled deep silt in Nevada. We rode that section in complete darkness except for our dim stock headlights that were mostly covered in mud. We manhandled the bikes in loose silt up to our axles. It was a blast. Since we can all hear each other in our helmet communication system I could hear the boys laughing and hooting as we battled our way to battle mountain. When we arrived at the gas station we were totally exhausted, covered with silt from head to toe and looked like a royal mess. We really were getting some stares from people.

Here is a picture of Weston, he tried using his headlamp for extra light, he claimed it helped…

We were tired but happy.

At about 9:00 PM we found ourselves at the Owl Club restaurant for a late dinner, we had no idea where we would camp.

Since the Owl Club had a hotel attached and it was late I considered invoking by father veto on the no hotel rule but restrained myself. After consulting our iPhone app and the hostess at the club we decided to take a nighttime ride 20 miles to the south to the Mill Creek BLM campsite.  We were tired and it was getting cold as we rode down the road in complete darkness. I was in my tent and instantly asleep at 11:00 PM. What a day, I checked my odometer and we rode 266 miles for the day, mostly all TAT miles in the sand.

I’m breaking up the last few days into separate posts and should have it completed soon.

Thanks for following,

Donn, Jon, Weston