PAGE 32 www. FavoriteRidesAndDestinations. com | ridermagazine. com
SPRING 2017 ISSUE 01 / VOL. 02 history it has survived, but steel shutters( forged in 19th-century San Francisco) on all the doors and windows suggest it wasn’ t always easy. You can still buy a saddle here, and thanks to the new world order, next door to the redolent-with-leather saddle shop you can get a passable turkey panini at the Surprise Café and Java Bar. Here also in a ground floor storefront of the C & B building is Floating Island Books, a treasure trove of Great Basin literature and maps run by my Bay Area ex-pat friend Mike Sykes. Mike’ s is the ideal location from where to launch the tour. Much of the following was inspired by perusing resources here.
The Warner Valley wetland in stunning autumn hues.
Summit of Fandango Pass, Warner Mountains, elevation 5,884 feet. This 12-mile side trip to check out the memorial to the thousands of emigrants who passed this way with their ox-drawn wagons on the Applegate Trail in the mid-19th century on their way to Oregon is our first taste of the more than 400 miles of gravel roads to come on this tour. Your machine is going to get dusty, and you’ ll worry about losing parts on the washboards, but gravel roads take you to places like this where history just whups you upside the head, where precisely here at this spot on October 3, 1848, Captain J. Goldsborough Bruff entered in his journal the following:“ One wagon with women and children in it … became uncoupled and downhill it ran stern first with great rapidity, the women and children screamed, men shouted … a dead ox a short distance in front of a heavy team brought up the backing( up) vehicle most luckily without damage to anyone.” A few miles north of here situated on a windswept grassy hill above the 1863-