Ely, NV to Somewhere in the Desert – 91 miles
Woke up looking forward to covering some good miles. A couple of US Forest Rangers drove by, stopped, and talked for awhile. Thought I might get another stern talking to for awhile, but found out that they were just driving around checking things out because a lot of kids from Ely party in that particular canyon. One of them had actually seen me riding the day before and clocked me with his radar doing 22 mph, which is pretty surprising because the wind was kicking my ass all day. Little did I know that today was going to be worse.
After packing up I set out and started climbing the first pass of the day (Murray, I think). Not too bad of a climb and because it was early in the day the wind hadn’t picked up yet. After descending the pass I quickly made it to where Chance had dropped my water off the day before.
It was right at the junction of Hwy 6 and a state highway where there is a burrito stand. I found the sign that he left it under kind of funny. Guess I missed one of the best attractions in Ely.
Since I was only about 25 miles outside of Ely I hadn’t drank much water, so I stood there for awhile trying to flag down a car to see if they could take it to Warm Springs for me – about another 75 miles. Plenty of people saw me waving, but no one stopped. I think part of it had to do with the fact that there was an intersection and I was trying to anticipate who was going straight and who was turning. Eventually I decided to ride down the road about mile and try again knowing that everyone who passed would at least be going in the right direction so I could start waving as soon as I saw them. I had much better luck after leaving the intersection. The first couple cars I saw stopped, but neither were going far enough on Hwy 6 to make it worth it. Finally someone stopped who was going all the way to Bakersfield, CA. They agreed to take the water and drop it off at the ghost town of Warm Springs for me. All in all the ordeal took me around an hour and by the time I was back at it the wind had picked up significantly.
After riding through the basin for awhile I started climbing the next pass, Currant Summit.
After the descent I passed through the ghost town of Currant. It seems that Nevada is full of these towns that have been deserted. Not sure why. It seems like there was a lot of mining here so perhaps many of them popped up due to certain mines and then died out when the mines did. By now the head winds had really picked up. The next section was a long flat section that took forever.
As I started climbing next pass the sun was going down. When I was almost at the top a saw another cyclist going the opposite direction. I was really surprised to see another person riding a bike especially since I had left the Adventure Cycling route in Ely. I stopped and we talked for awhile. His name was Peter and he was cycling from San Diego to somewhere in Pennsylvania for his 50 year (it might have been 40, either way, impressive) class reunion!
I decided to ride a bit further because I wanted to reduce the amount of miles I had to do the next day. The sunset was gorgeous. When I finally decided to stop I was exhausted and barely had the energy to cook food, but I knew I had to eat something if I wanted to have any energy the next day, so I made a mountain house and mixed a pack of Ramen Noodles with it. After gorging I fell asleep looking at the stars through the canopy of my tent.
