Wheels: Go East, Old Man: Mired in the Primordial Ooze

Courtesy of Dexter Ford Dexter Ford, at the start of his journey, in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Dexter Ford is traveling from Southern California to upstate New York along mostly obscure roads, on a motorcycle that, by American standards, is quite tiny. This is the first of his occasional reports from the paths less traveled.

Taking a solo coast-to-coast trip on a Honda CBR250R seemed like a good idea initially. But when my motorcycle was stuck in a place without a name in the middle of the Nevada desert, ankle-deep in the slipperiest, most evil mud into which I had ever sunk, I had to reconsider.

It was the second day of my journey: just me, my little Honda, some rain and camping gear and a brace of credit cards. I had fallen in love with the featherweight CBR when I tested it in 2011, and when Honda offered the 2013 model in nasty toenail-polish red, it had me. My family has an old lake house in the Adirondacks, so I wanted to to blast around the East Coast on it. The problem was that I live on the West Coast.

Oh well. Epic road trip. But I set some basic rules for myself: Avoid freeways; avoid straight roads; when in doubt, do something interesting and try not to die.

After weeks of agony as I finished a book about a friend who grew up in Nazi concentration camps, I was primed for a ride — a very long ride — that would have nothing to do with Nazi concentration camps. So on July 5, at 7:12 a.m., I had an early-morning dog walker shoot a picture of me and my bike on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and I headed north as quickly as possible. Which is not very fast, given my CBR’s maximum speed of about 85 miles per hour, downhill with a tailwind.

If you draw a straight line between Los Angeles and Yellowstone National Park, one of my bucket-list waypoints, it goes straight through Death Valley, where temperatures had hit a record American high of 129 degrees the week before. So I curved my route in a clockwise orientation instead, escaping Death Valley’s withering heat through the Owens Valley, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. In dodging the lowest, hottest part of the Lower 48, I rode past its highest point, Mount Whitney, rising above the valley in all its sawtoothed grayness.

With Whitney still in sight, I banged a right in Big Pine, Calif., twisting up Route 168 over Westgard Pass and then into Nevada, to Tonopah, then up Big Smoky Valley. The skies ahead were starting to look like bruises, and I could see mare’s-tails of hanging rain under the thunderheads, the rain evaporating in the high desert air before it hit the ground.

At Eureka, Nev., I called it a day. The next day, I would make my first big mistake.

Dexter Ford Alone on a tiny motorcycle in the middle of the desert, the sheer distance between nodes of civilization can be intimidating.

The sane way to ride a motorcycle alone in the desert entails traveling what we veteran motorcyclists call “paved roads.” The problem was that in northeastern Nevada — in particular, between Eureka and Wells — these tend to be straight, endless, mind-numbing affairs. Those long straightaways include soul-stirring vistas right out of “Bonanza” on either side, to be sure. But they definitely weren’t ideal for my mini-motored Honda.

Route 892, according to Google Maps, would save many miles and whisk me past the Diamond Mountains onto the Pony Express National Historic Trail, which would deliver me into the lush Ruby Valley, with the soaring Ruby Mountains on the left and soul-quenching Ruby Lake on the right. Would I also thump over a pair of dusty ruby slippers? There was only one way to find out.

I consulted the ultimate authority: the young woman, with just one visible piercing, behind the desk at the Eureka Best Western.

“The Diamond Mountains are my favorite mountains ever,” she said. “Just don’t hit a deer. My daddy has hit more deer on that road than he has fingers. There’s a dirt road you have to find, to get across to Ruby Valley, but a car can make it through.”

What could go wrong?

Route 892 transitioned from asphalt into a wonderful, graded gravel road. I was humming along at 50 m.p.h.; the bike was ideally suited for the road surface. Just as I started getting antsy — in a directional sense — another dirt road curved off to the east, about where I thought I wanted to go, with a sign marking the Pony Express National Historic Trail. Did I want to ride my tiny, heavily laden new street bike across the Nevada desert on a trail, however historically significant? Was this the road that what’s-her-name, my impromptu guide, had been talking about?

I peeled off east onto the Pony Express trail, which was great. My CBR, which looks more like a toy Ducati than a dirt bike, worked perfectly, even with my generous, manly form and 50 pounds of gear straddled atop its slight frame.

Then the mud started. At first, there were wet spots in the road at the bottom of each gully. Then longer stretches of mud sprang up, one of which practically had me paddling. I didn’t want to go back through that one, and the ground ahead seemed to be rising, so I kept going.

The last muddy patch I encountered was a good hundred feet long. Sometimes mud has dry traction an inch or so underneath. Sometimes it doesn’t. This bit didn’t. By the time I found this out, there was no turning back. The bike would slither a few feet forward, then stop against mud piled up against the front wheel. I would pull it back a few inches, take another little run, and gain two or three more feet. Or not. If I had tried to get off the bike, we both would have fallen in the mud, with not much real chance of getting back up.

I stopped, let my heart and the bike cool down, then tried for a few more feet. The light weight and low seat height of my brave new Honda were what saved me. I dimly realized that if I could dig my toes down into the mud and reach some terra firma somewhere underneath, I could use that tiny bit of grip to make halting, wheezing progress.

When I finally got there, muddied but not bloodied, Ruby Valley was gorgeous. No slippers, but lovely all the same. I’ll go back there someday and kayak down lush, meandering Ruby Lake. But I think I’ll take another route to get there.