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SPRING 2017 ISSUE 01 / VOL. 02
Ryan atop the cirque of the Kiger Gorge. Right top: Ride‘ em along the East Steens“ Highway.” Right bottom: If old buildings could talk, what stories we’ d hear, especially from this one in McDermitt, Nevada.
Kiger Gorge. You park your machine at the top of the cirque here and your jaw drops and your knees weaken and you think, not in Glacier National Park, not in Yosemite Valley, nowhere else have you seen the complexion of the planet as dramatic as this. As if to put an exclamation point on things, as we park the bikes and walk a quarter-mile foot path to the summit of the mountain where the enormous view is of three states, a wild September thunderstorm careens in with howling winds and lightning flashes and grapeshot hail and plunging temperatures. Ah, memories are made of this.
Another day I’ d term, what a day. Down to Fields, Oregon, population 14, early for breakfast, too early for one of their famous milkshakes but in plenty of time for one of their colossal breakfasts, like three eggs over easy on top of a load of hash browns covered with cheese sauce, and if you can’ t make up your mind about ham, bacon or sausage you get all three.
After breakfast, we head north on the East Steens 60-mile-long gravel“ highway” to connect with pavement again at Highway 78, and then south on Highway 95 to Winnemucca, but not without first soaking in a hot spring along the way in the Alvord Desert, and while enjoying the soak staring upward at the vertical eastern walls of The Steens awash in golden morning light. We make it to Winnemucca in time to have a Basque din-din at The Martin Hotel( since 1885) astride the railroad tracks where we’ re not in Nevada anymore but rather in northern Spain, in family home-evening San Sebastian, where the lamb shanks fall off the bone and there are spices in the hominy and chorizo appetizer that smell exactly like the raindampened desert sagebrush we’ ve been inhaling for 300 miles. There are meals you will always remember and this is one of them.
On tours like this I usually take a relevant book to read along the way. The one I pack this time is“ Life Among The Paiutes: Their Wrongs and