Friday dawned in a fog which spent most of the morn dispersing but by late afternoon when my brother Kirk aka “Harv” [see http://www.wmkirkmoore.com/ ] and his longtime buddy Tom -aka “Walt” [http://www.anawaltcustombuilders.com/] – showed up in a big borrowed crewcab diesel Dodge the light had become flat and unphotogenic.

These busy boys with their lifelong history of roadtrips had come circuitously over the Sierra from the coast with the notion of driving around the desert all day Saturday and then making it back to Mill Valley by Sunday mid-afternoon, an admirable plan although according to NOAA the weather was tending towards the life-threatening.  After an evening of reminiscence, very good steaks and lively discussion over a couple of hearty reds we figured it couldn’t hurt to at least try to make dirt road inroads into the Sheldon Range, maybe even as far as 140 and – ha ha! – over to Duferrena Rim; all NOAA was saying, really, aside from the High Wind Warnings and Winter Weather Watch, was that snow accumulation on the plateaus would be a mere 1″ during the day, hey…

The morning after, following the obligatory Tour of the Ponds and hearty breakfasts, we and the dogs set off for Cedarville in changeable light and weather…Aggie definitely not sure about this at first despite the Dodge’s luxurious leather interior [or maybe because of it]…

She soon adapted, as if to the leather born, but it was fairly pouring by the time we pulled in to the Surprise Valley Cafe for coffee to find that that had been the case all night. Over at Rabbit Traxx the kid pumping gas looked askance at our tires [when you’re a young country gearhead any tire lacking the treads of some super-military 6×6 is assumed insufficient] and voiced dire warnings about conditions to the east…particularly for three old farts without a shovel.  We did have a fancy electrical winch stashed in the bed, but without anything to attach the cable to in the foreseeable country that probably wasn’t going to be much help except as ballast.  Undeterred we set out forthwith in spits of rain, leaving pavement and California behind simultaneously, to climb over the Hays Canyon Range through slush, sleet, eventually an inch or so of wet snow and so down to Long Valley, snow becoming slush again as the occasional cowboy flatbed sloshed by inbound.  Well, one anyway, emerging from the murk with absolutely ordinary tires….

8A east was intermittently muddy…we turned onto it anyway, Tom driving the big Dodge judiciously into the Unknowable…

After ten miles of squalls, photo ops and various greasy patches, but well before reaching the mythical pavement of the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway, we decided to pack it in; somewhere out around Massacre Lake cautiously using the Massacre Cabin junction as a turnaround…

Still late morning but now westering in still [not exactly still – those wind warnings were no myth] volatile weathers for more photo ops, and, careful not to slip into any ditches, back across Long Valley to higher grounds…

Highway 8A, though tentatively thinking about it, was not yet flooded as it approached its junction with the north-south arterial Highway 34 near Vya and, as yet another cell moved in, our lunch…

Just past the junction, to take advantage of the view back towards where we’d been, Tom deployed the rearview camera [though not, assuming it had one, its self-cleansing option] in an attempt to back up…looking out the windows seemed to serve us better, and looking out the front brought to mind my friend Steve’s blog on the Sheldon from last summer [http://srstern.com/2014/finding-our-first-leftover/]…

… this being winter, and life-threatening weather if you listen to NOAA, the kid at Rabbit Traxx or are silly enough to venture/slip off the highway, our scenery differed. But the enigmas were there all the same as we consumed our potato chips, avocados, cheese, chocolate and warm beverages in the commodious cab while Lefty and Aggie fended for the avo skins outside and the cowboys in the flatbed sloshed by again, east and out across the flat to…[?] wherever; their muddy inbound tracks had disappeared into the beyond beyond our Massacre Cabin turnaround point, that’s for sure.

A little after one, done, dogs gratefully back in the back with ice chest, coats, miscellany and me [Did I mention this was a large truck?] we turned south, Gerlach allegedly some 75 miles down the graded though definitely slippy gravel road, seeing our second [and only other] vehicle of the day, a seventies-something shortbed flatbed 4X4 Ford running ordinary old 7.50x16s [i guess if you don’t live in town you don’t need them mil-spec tires so much] on his way in to Cedarville in the sleeting snow…one little ranch house surrounded by stock trailers and pickups after that, then mud and water on and on both sides of the road to the southern end of the aptly named Long Valley.

 

So to be…

continued…

 

M