Halfway through an as yet undocumented visit to the Green Desert I took Friday off to ‘enjoy the country’, as is sometimes said around here…

Without a lot of prep aside from assembling the day’s coffee I was heading in flat light for the Black Rock at 9:20, planning to veer north to the playas overhanging the hot springs,

…but half an hour up the desert found myself close to lost and probably experiencing some manifestation of the Quinn River Sink;

unknown bushes on the right, surfaces softening, then deceptively good going across a dry river channel until powdery silt under acres of tiny dried grasses began splatting mud up inside the wheelwells…

So, sink being the operative word here, I executed a wide steady arc to the southwest hoping for tracks, which when located eventually led to a similar quandary, requiring similar evasive maneuvers and considerable time struggling south to reach the Cholona way which, though rarely used this early in the season, soon found higher ground and eventually the siding.

After Cholona I paused at The Dip to pee, reassess my options and decide on a venture south towards [and possibly around] the “Lava Beds”, seemingly so called for being the most prominent non-igneous feature of the local geology…some kind of buckaroo humor, doubtless.

A trackless road up a nameless wash bypassed the unseen Garret Mine [another thing about the Lava Beds is they lie exactly at the intersection of the ‘Gerlach’ and ‘Eugene Mountains’ topos, so the tiny roads that run through them, if shown at all, wander indecipherable between the two charts]…

…and crested the range to descend to Windy Hill Mine, or what remained of it, for lunch…mild, with wildflowers. Though the light was never at its best the digital did its best to compensate. Somewhat.

Following al fresco tailgate dining the twotrack led into a dubious streambed which subsequently squirted out onto the alluvium well above Granite Springs Wash, trending south;

An intersection soon after definitively located us on the map as well as evidencing the first faint tire tracks since heading up that wash towards the Garret; we turned into the mountains and back-doored, with intermittent fourwheel creeping,

the upper reaches of the Lava Beds [!], then circumnavigated their vast lumpy uplands until a way to the road out,

…more radical and considerably further below than anticipated [good thing the brakes were redone], presented itself.

Out, that is, to the High Road, whose washboard vibrations Aggie, preferring the smooth playa, most actively eschewed the entire twenty-four miles to SR 447…

… and Gerlach for gas but no news at the [former?] Shell station, no one at work on the restaurant, so home utterly buzzed a bit before four; 157 sometimes iffy miles.  In all my time out here I’ve only walked out twice, once when stuck in a puddle at Summit Lake [see p. 41 of my Auto Biographies] and the other due to irreparable mechanical failure on Dickshooter Ridge in the Owyhee [ibid., p. 32].  Both were decades ago but it’s the kind of thing a guy tends to think about while out enjoying the country.  As well as pondering whether one might still be competent enough to render those mechanical failures [there were many] reparable, or make the walk out if not…

So; Green Desert to follow, as time allows.

M