Road Trip

FROM CHAIRBOUND SITZBUTT TO CLIMBIN' FOOL
REVERSING COURSE
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
OUT OF THE PAST
HOMEWARD BOUND

FROM CHAIRBOUND SITZBUTT TO CLIMBIN' FOOL (DAY 1: FROM NOTES WRITTEN LATER IN THE DAY AFTER A RIDE FROM SPRINGVILLE ON JULY 1)

Writing about road trips in general, as I did a few weeks ago, got me hankering for a road trip in particular. July 1 marks two years to the day since I slowly rose from my desk chair and poured myself and my rarely ridden bike into my truck for yet another battle on my sorry fat ass. I desperately needed to reverse my physical and spiritual decline and finally get back into shape.

I’m two years on the wagon. So far, my 24-month frontal assault, i.e., my assault on my frontal—and my rearward—has stuck. Sprinkling in road trips at strategic intervals is crucial to the process. (That’s what I tell me wife.)

These days, I favor a few days riding in the Sierra. One specific part of California’s big range was my destination two years ago, and this latest venture (which I’m now on) marks my third such trip to these mountains to ride. I came back last year and further explored these roads, which must have been built with cyclists in mind, because there sure aren’t many motorists using them.

Road trips start paying me benefits before I ever leave. Even if I’m only going for three or four days, I feel that somehow things I’ve been putting off for weeks must be finished prior to my departure. I furiously tie up loose ends. If I had stayed around I wouldn’t have gotten this stuff done for several more weeks. But because I’m leaving town, I must finish everything now.

I go on the road for rejuvenation—or perhaps re-juvenilization. I’m trying to retrieve something vaguely remembered—a nostalgia that sits at the edge of my periphery. It’s always here in these mountains when I arrive, and I truly don’t know whether it’s been here waiting, or whether I bring it with me. Whatever it is, it’s largely responsible for whatever sparkle I still have in my eye, even when I’m down below performing my flatland routine.

It might be simple wanderlust. Or a nostalgic desire for much earlier days when I spent years living happily among these mountains. I hope it’s more than that, of course. I think God is up here. He’s everywhere, apparently, but I fancy He likes it up here more than He likes it in "civilization," and I base this on a simple premise. If He prefers the way we’ve remade His landscapes, He’d have put the buildings and parking lots here in the first place.

Alongside all the possible motives listed above for my coming up here is this one: I can ride my brains out in relative peace, without distraction, and up some very, very large mountains. That’s as far as I’m going to analyze it. I don’t want to peel this onion any more. Though the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil may hang within my reach, I’ll not grasp it. I choose ignorant bliss, and choose it blissfully.

I’m employing the "drive from spot to spot" Road Trip. This allows maximum flexibility in one sense, in that you can skip from spot to spot on a whim. The downside is that you must finish each ride where you start—there’s no point-to-point. Another plus, though, is that you don’t have to plan. You just go.

Things Change. Which is the flip side of the coin to Shit Happens—the latter being the evil twin of the former. Not knowing what might befall one during a road trip, I’m going to get a big ride in on the first day. Then, whatever happens, happens—even if it’s shit—and, at a minimum, I’ve worn out the leather on my ass and saddle both in one fell six-and-a-half-hour swoop.

I chose a ride that scared me. This loop proved to be 102 miles. Two things had me concerned. First, it is annoyingly hot in California’s Central Valley during the midday summer sun. Assuming you choose to ride in daylight hours, you can’t spend six or seven hours in the saddle without doing some of the ride in the heat of the day. It’s best to get the messy valley part done early.

This ride started in Springville, a few miles up mountainous Highway 190 from Porterville. This road eventually folds into a remarkably ill-traveled route termed the Western Divide Highway. I stayed at the Springville Inn. Were I to return and do this again, I might camp at the modern, improved campground at Lake Success, just a few miles toward Porterville.

Springville is a small, Gold Rush-style town straddling a couple hundred yards of #190. The town—and #190—follows the course of the Tule River, the southernmost of the Sierra’s great rivers, not counting the mighty Kern. Springville sits at 1,000 feet above sea level, and my ride took me down into the Valley, to the outskirts of Porterville, gently descending to 450 feet. I turned left turn on Plano Avenue and rode southward, hugging the base of the Greenhorn Mountains. Here, as was the case throughout this entire ride, I encountered a vehicle every ten minutes or so. This even though it was the 4th of July weekend, when the auto club estimated that 32 million people would pile into their cars and travel at least 100 miles.

When I reached Fountain Springs—a geographic oxymoron, genuine false advertising: I defy you to show me either a fountain or a spring—you’ve got three options.

You do NOT, by the way, have three choices. You have ONE choice, comprised of three options. Grammar police have made great strides in the eradication of irregardless, and have happily, I note, started in on nucular. They are woefully silent, though, on the confusion between an option and a choice.

Your three options are: right, which leads you to Ducor and into the center of the Valley; straight, which takes you to two other—and equally spectacular—climbs; or left, toward California Hot Springs, where my loop took me.

I had a second concern about this ride, which springs from the fact that I do not particularly enjoy pain. Which is to say, I enjoy it mildly: I mildly enjoy substantial pain, and I substantially enjoy mild pain, but I do NOT have a substantial inclination toward substantial pain. And I was about to climb a taller mountain than I had ever climbed before. I’ve climbed many peaks and passes that met or exceeded a net elevation gain of 4,500 feet or so, including Palomar in San Diego (which I’ve climbed many times, and it never gets easier) and Mt. Rose outside of Reno (a spectacular climb that drops into the Lake Tahoe basin), among others. But THIS climb was to take me from 400 feet to 7,400 feet, with a total elevation gain of perhaps 8,500 feet because of descents incurred during the process.

It wasn’t the climb that worried me, but whether I’d planned this thing right. I do not handle heat well. My concern was whether the mountain would heat up before I got far enough along.

Breakfasted and revved up, I was on the road at 6:45 a.m. I’d gotten through the 28 or so miles of flatlands by 8 a.m. and commenced the climb in what was still a very comfortable temperature. The climb up to California Hot Springs—the midway point of the day’s altitude gain—is in a way the more difficult part. It is frequently steeper, reaching 9 or 10 percent at times, and has two or three significant descents sprinkled throughout. This is always depressing. It’s not unlike the feeling I get when I’ve enjoyed a 12-month run-up in stock only to lose half of what I’ve gained in a weeklong downward spiral. I therefore now only invest in mutual funds, and I never look at them. But I couldn’t escape noticing that I was repeatedly relinquishing a good part of the elevation I’d gained.

This part of the climb occurs over 18 miles, and although California Hot Springs sits at about 3,600 feet above sea level, your legs have 4,000 or more feet of total climbing in them by the time you arrive. Still, the weather was good and I reached the Hot Springs at 9:30 or so. I’d forgotten to bring my gels along when I left San Diego, so I acquired a pair of Snickers bars upon my arrival. I also purchased a pair of 750ml bottles of water—particularly tasty and bottled on the premises from California Hot Springs’ own wells.

From here, the road veers left. You can veer right if you want and go toward Pine Valley, another mile up the road. I’ve stayed here before, at a friendly motel called the Rabbit’s Foot Trail Inn, with its restaurant attached. But the road peters out further on and turns to dirt. Still, this is a good place to start the ride if you wanted to do the loop backwards. This would get the Valley section out of the way early. But then you miss the Descent of Descents (more on that later).

As you veer to the left and onto Parker Pass Road, you descend again. This is the final altitude loss of this climb until Parker Pass, which sits at 6,600 feet. I’d done this climb twice before, but only starting from California Hot Springs. I’d never done it in the heat of summer, as part of a century, with 4,000 feet of climbing already in my legs. This section of the climb occurs over 11 miles and ascends from 3,500 feet to 6,600 feet. This is a reasonable 5.3 percent climb, with the steepest parts of this grade no more than, say, 7.5 percent. This makes it a nice, garden-variety Sierra pass, and it wasn’t all that arduous.

The nice thing about passes like this is the vivid change in foliage. The scenery didn’t change too much on the way to California Hot Springs. Canyon live oaks gave way to... canyon live oaks. Buckeyes appear near the end of that first section of the climb, as do the first few scraggly digger pines. On Parker Pass Road you experience the change from oak woodland to alpine forest. This is a big part of the spiritual journey for me.

Oaks are joined by digger pines as the Parker Pass climb commences—the first sense I get that my hard work is about to be rewarded. From here, the foliage changes are predictable: It is the same from the Northern Sierra south to the San Pedro Martir mountains of Baja California. Digger pines (replaced by coulter pines below the Sierra) give way to ponderosa pines. Higher up, these are joined by incense cedars and white firs. Oaks reappear higher yet, but these are deciduous, broad-leafed California black oaks, not the evergreen live oaks of the foothills below. Still higher are sugar pines, the world’s tallest pine with the world’s longest cones. If you know your latitude, you can fairly accurately guess your elevation just by observing the sylvan makeup.

A light dusting of gravel fell down the side of a cliff above me as I ascended through pines and cedars. I looked up to a ledge 20 or 30 feet above me. A young doe stood atop, feet on the edge, not moving, watching this odd figure awkwardly struggling upward, 20 feet below her.

Cows grazed on the road itself and had nowhere to run as I rode toward them. There was a wall to the inside and a drop-off to the outside. So they ran in front of me for a spell, and I hoped I wouldn’t force them into having a heart attack or whatever it is cows suffer when they exceed their anaerobic threshold.

The top of Parker Pass arrives with no fanfare. There is no sign and, for that matter, there are no elevation markers on the way up. It is truly a rural road. The only way you know you’ve arrived is that you start to descend, and there is nothing but deep blue air immediately above you.

The descent is gentle and only lasts for half a mile. You reach a stop sign and can continue on, in which case you’ll end up, 25 miles and a nice descent later, in Kernville. Or you can turn left, which is what I did, and you’ll be on the Western Divide Highway. This road straddles a col that falls off into the Kern River Gorge to the right and gives way to gentle pine and fir forests to the left.

Alternating climbs and descents occur over the next 13 miles, and the net effect is to spot you on top of the road at 7,400 feet. If you keep your nose to the road, however, you’ll miss a giant sequoia grove. Nothing huge here, the trees are all young. Probably nothing here born before, say, the time of Charlemagne.

When you do reach 7,400 feet you come to Ponderosa, which consists of a cafe, a small store and a few cabins. And, happily, lunch. Fortunately, I arrived just after noon and the kitchen was going full throttle.

I’d gone about 75 miles by this time, and the nice thing about the ride is that it was basically over for me. Yes, I had 27 miles to go, but you can’t call the descent in front of me cycling. More like an amusement park ride. I knew this because I had twice driven it. You know it’s a good road for cycling when it’s a horrible road for driving. You can’t get a car over 25 miles an hour on this thing for an entire hour.

I’ve ridden in a lot of mountains. I’ve experienced the Swiss and Maritime Alps, the Rockies, Appalachians, Mexican highlands, Germany’s Hohe Eiffel, and the Sierra Nevada. I believe I can say that there is no more outrageous example of spaghettified highway west of the Dolomites. This is 45 minutes of Thunder Mountain. Disneyland would charge fifty bucks for this ride alone.

For cyclists, the best descents are not those down which you careen at 50 miles an hour. When you’re dangerously pushing the envelope at 35, that’s a descent. Two-hundred-degree turns left, then right; turns on top of turns; turns that are guaranteed to make you carsick if you are unfortunate enough to not be the driver. This is just such a road. It’s more slalom than anything.

I encountered only one car during the entire descent, and I easily slid by without mishap. The temperature was chilly at the top, and a palpable change in temperature was apparent every three or four minutes.

I felt surprisingly good after I finished the descent. I certainly didn’t feel like I’d ridden a hundred miles. More like seventy.

REVERSING COURSE (DAY 2: FROM NOTES WRITTEN AFTER A RIDE FROM SPRINGVILLE ON JULY 2.)

Today was a travel day. I made this decision the evening before. More on that later. Because I’d be driving eight hours in the afternoon to cycle a 40-minute section of road a mountain range away, I’d have to compress my riding into fewer hours today. Two things I wanted to do: go up the way I’d come down the day before, and come down the same descent one more time.

Every classic descent must be a great ride up, I figure. Since I’ll be climbing #190 from Springville to the Western Divide Highway, the net elevation gain on this day will only be 6,400 feet, less than yesterday. It happens over 27 miles, so nothing will be too steep.

It seemed like I got to the 2,000-foot sign in a flash, and the 3,000-foot sign came not long thereafter. There were a couple of obvious challenges for the civil engineers building this road. At one point, ascending a spillway, you round a corner and directly below you is the road you came up. If you missed the turn on the descent, you’d land splat, astraddle the double-yellow 200 feet below.

Another nice engineering feature is a flume following the road for several miles right at this altitude. This is a common sight in gold country. I’ve seen flumes on the Truckee; I seem to remember one or two on the Yuba and Feather rivers; and I although I can’t remember where else I’ve seen them, I know there are a few more out there. Prolific use of hydraulic power during in the 19th century to get at the gold significantly modified both the western Sierra mountainsides and the Sacramento deltas. Flumes like this were built back then for such purposes, and many—like this one—still carry water. I don’t know why, or whether, they are still maintained. Maybe they were built so sturdily they’ve just never needed upkeep. Or perhaps farmers rely on the water now.

At 4,000 feet above sea level, this road is quiet. Not even the sound of birds and squirrels are heard. It’s a cacophony of silence—or should that be "silents:" thick with life though this biozone may be, not a sound is produced by any of it.

Like yesterday’s ride, the top of this ascent also arrives with no notice. Just a sign that says "Needle Road," referring to a single lane of dirt to the east.

I had a Snickers at the Ponderosa. A grizzled white-beard accosted me for some conversation. I asked him if cafe racers—helmeted guys in colored leather suits on matching fiberglass motorcycles racing at high speeds over mountain roads—ever frequented the Western Divide Highway. "Half a dozen came up last year," he told me. "They rode up Parker Pass. I told them, ‘Don’t think going down this road [to Springville] is going to be like the one you came up. It’s very tricky. Keep it under 30 miles an hour.’

"I went down the hill a little later," he continued. "There was the fire truck and the mountain rescue. He was 500 feet past the edge of the road he went over. To top it off, his buddies came back two weeks later to visit their friend—still in the hospital—and to retrieve his helmet and jacket—still up on the mountain. One of them went over the edge, too. Joined his friend in the hospital. How stupid can you get?"

Just the same, I can’t imagine why there aren’t more cafe racers up here to take up the challenge. Then again, why aren’t there any bicyclists up here? Perhaps it’s just too far to travel. Nothing on two wheels comes here, neither De Rosas nor Ducatis. I’m not complaining.

Imagine a 45-minute descent. That’s how long it takes you if you’re a top-notch descender, even if you consider the descent finished at the 2,000-foot elevation level, where the terrain starts to flatten out and even occasionally climb. This downhill gives you more air time than a week of ABC’s Tour coverage, if you subtract the commercials.

The climb takes about two and a half hours if you’re strong, three hours if you’re a fairly good climber, 3:15-3:30 for M.O.P.’ers. The ride down from the top all the way to Springville takes about an hour, perhaps an hour and a quarter. Springville itself is not a bad place to be based for a spate of several rides. I rode twice while I was here and left several promising routes unexplored. Springville serves as the junction of #190 and J37, the road to Mountain Home. I’ve never taken this route, but how bad can a place named Mountain Home be?

On my maps, J37 also leads to M296, another unknown quantity, to me anyway. It has a squiggly contour, always promising, and can be used to make a loop. Looks to be in the 80-mile range. Further exploration of this area seems inevitable.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN (LATER ON DAY 2: DRIVING NORTH FROM SPRINGVILLE ON JULY 2, FROM NOTES WRITTEN THE NEXT DAY)

But first, a digression...

I am not in the sort of shape I used to be. Not that I'm past the ability to regain my former fitness. I may be 43 years old, but I haven't gotten to the point where I'm ready to concede anything to age. So I still dream of PRs.

Having said that, nowadays I discover speed in otherwise forgotten or ignored places. In my previous, younger iteration as an athlete, it was just an issue of lung and leg power. Now I pay a lot of attention to technique, balance, momentum—what you might call the art and the science, as opposed to the sport and the battle, of competition.

Climbing out of the saddle is an area in which I'm better developed than in times past, and this made climbing these passes much easier than might have otherwise been the case. So I thought it might be a good idea to write about effective out-of-the-saddle climbing.

I drove down through Porterville and hit the north-south I-99. Northbound won by a 70-to-30 vote. When I'm on a road trip and I'm driving on a tangent line from home, I'm vulnerable to the barn-scent. I have a strong hankerin' for the road, but also for home. More on that later.

Safely on a northerly heading, I passed through Fresno, Merced, and Modesto and veered east at the outskirts of Stockton. I headed up through Highway 88, perhaps the first of the oft-used east-west Sierra crossings starting the mid-1850s. I drove over Carson Spur, Carson Pass, and Hope Valley. I dropped into the Lake Tahoe basin, where I spent my last two years in high school and caught my terminal case of mountain fever.

I popped over the other side and into Washoe Valley. I drove through Carson City and past Washoe Lake, where I used to pedal over to Bob LeMond's house for the occasional ride. Bob was a very good bike racer himself, but it was his son who won three Tours de France. I'll never know why Greg traded in this idyllic spot against the western slopes of the Sierra—mountains that hedge in the easternmost waters of Lake Tahoe—for the flat tundra of Wayzata, Minnesota.

Tomorrow I will draw from something out of my past. Which reminds me of that great film noir, "Out of the Past," with Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Jane Greer. Seeing this film will make you realize that "Against All Odds," with James Woods, Jeff Bridges, and Rachel Ward, is just a remake of this great old movie. Jane Greer does play a cameo in the later version.

Speaking of mid-1950s art, most people don't know that Mission Bay Multisport's owner, Bill Linneman, came to America as an immigrant from Germany during that era. He learned English by listening to the radio. As a result, although he isn't necessarily fond of all the music, he is a Library of Congress of early rock and roll songs. "OK," I said, "who sang ‘Wolverton Mountain’?" After the barest of pauses, the answer came back: "Claude King." Not one in a thousand would know that (no offense to Mr. King).

OUT OF THE PAST

Reno, Nevada sits at 4,500 feet above sea level. Endurance-type people are always going on about the quality of training life available in places like Boulder, Durango, Bend and Flagstaff, and those are great places. Reno would have them all beat, in my book, except for the institution of gambling—or "gaming," as casino executives prefer it to be called.

The town is beset by a permanent, hovering spirit of smarminess. This is the capital of Sans-A-Belt, with more open shirts, gold chains and white shoes per capita than any place on earth, except for its big-sister city 400 miles to the south.

Not that I mind the casinos, per se. And I don’t mind if busloads of ignorant marks exercise their latissimus dorsi muscles yanking slot machine handles for hours on end. What bothers me is the false promise of a glamorous, lucrative living to be earned by casino workers.

Ornate red and tan carpets replace pension plans. Stale clouds of cigarette smoke are more prevalent than paid vacations and long-term disability. Bad liquor wins out over job training and upward mobility. Twenty-four hours of lights and noise outvote good pay and a solid future. People who live here grow to know and accept the zombified stare of longtime casino workers. Harder to face is their own zombified existence. Gambling is an industry for those who own the casinos and indentured servitude for those who work in them.

What Reno needs is a few dot-coms and a bio-tech or two. Silicon Valley, now priced sky-high and just three hours away, ought to peek over the hill and get a load of this place. Physically, it kicks the crap out of just about anyplace one might settle, and it’s priced right.

I spent five years here, going to college at the University of Nevada. I raced on the ski team (as a nordic racer) and started cycling during the summer to stay fit. That was my introduction to bikes. Pretty soon, bikes overtook skinny skis for me.

Reno is a good place to cut your cycling teeth. The winter is not too bad. You can ride flat or you can ride hills. Plenty of rural roads here.

Reno sits on the far western edge of the Great Basin. Your mind’s eye might picture a large, shallow salad bowl, with an alkaline sink in the center, but the Great Basin is actually filled with tall mountain ranges, one after the other, as one travels west to east. Jedediah Smith was the first white man to make the Great Basin crossing, circa 1827. He lost almost all his men, mules and equipment during the journey. It’s a tough, wild place, and happily, it is this wildness that dominates the state. Casinos and their owners huddle together in a few valley enclaves. The rest of the state is reserved for bighorn sheep, wild horses and 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines.

The first mountain range on the lee side of the Sierra, traveling eastward, separates Reno from Virginia City. The road between the two is called Geiger Grade. Although it’s not the biggest climb in these parts, this was my "great white whale." The ascent—eight miles long, with 2,200 feet of elevation gain—was not too tall, or short, or steep. I rode this hill a lot, as did a lot of Reno’s cyclists. Presumably this is still the case.

My best time from the 7-Eleven store (where we cyclists decided the climb begins) to the top was just over 35 minutes. I did this about 20 years ago, and I’ve never been back. But for the past several months, I’ve wondered just how badly I’d fare on this "hill of my youth." I’m older, heavier, and flabbier. But I’m much more treacherous. (Does treachery help during an ascent?)

I rode out of town, about five miles, and hit the 7-Eleven. I reset my computer. The race was on. What’s this? A little breeze in my face. Hopefully not for long.

I rounded the first bend, and then the second, and it started to look familiar to me again. On the lower slopes a few ponderosa pines hang around, but they’ll soon be gone. These mountains are in a rain shadow. Nothing here but pinon pines and Utah junipers. I’m lugging in my 17-tooth cog. I spend a lot of time standing up. So far, not too bad, but I wished my cadence was five beats higher.

This is a nice climb because there are a lot of switchbacks. It’s also a storied road. The last stagecoach robbery in the West happened here on Geiger Grade. This is just the sort of thing Nevada would choose to advertise about itself.

I hit three miles in no time at all and thought, "I’m feeling pretty good." But I couldn’t turn over the 17 very well. Too many chocolate muffins. Too many Cadillac margaritas (rocks, no salt). And a little too much breeze, which seemed to be in my face almost without regard to which direction I was facing.

A false summit occurs about six miles into the climb. I arrived in about 33 minutes. Too slow. Wind—the one bad thing about this place. The "Washoe Zephyr," they call it. Or, as Mad Jack (Ray Walston) so aptly put it in "Paint Your Wagon," "That bloody, bloody wind." Which is the cue, by the way, for Harve Presnell to belt out, "They caaaalll the wind Mariaaaaaaah." This was 25 years before he played the stingy, wealthy father-in-law in "Fargo."

I’m thinking all this as I get ready for the last push to the top. And I drove eight hours for this? Damn right I did. I reached the summit—very un-Armstrong-like—in 42 minutes, which is a little disappointing. But, I tell myself, with eight fewer pounds, two or three more tries and a neutral wind, I’m back in the 36- or 37-minute range. Perhaps there’s hope for me after all.

There is a four-mile descent from the top to Virginia City, which never has decided whether it is a gambling or a historical silver-mining town. Its funky, provincial atmosphere appeals to me. There is nothing here called a casino. Everything is a saloon. This means the casinos—small as they are—are labeled saloons. Chief among them is the Bucket of Blood Saloon. Fortunately, Harrahs, MGM and Hilton haven’t found this town yet. God help this town if they ever do.

Virginia City is in Storey County. So if one wanted to open a cat-house here, it would be more or less legal. I’m not fond of the prostitution industry. Leave it to Nevada to still allow it. The state’s chief industry is manipulation of people.

But this state is not without irony. Storey County’s erstwhile tsar—Joe Conforte—owned all the big cat-houses when I lived here and was convicted of tax evasion some years back. His Mustang Ranch was seized by the government. It was a legal, legitimate (more or less) enterprise, and the government had no choice but to continue to operate it until it could recoup unpaid taxes. Imagine bean counters from the Department of the Treasury running Mustang Ranch. Will that be cash or check, sir?

Right in the center of town is the Territorial Enterprise building, which housed the newspaper where a pretty good writer cut his teeth. "Roughing It" is the tale of his Virginia City days, and Mark Twain’s view of Nevada, even as he saw it during the 1880s, is still accurate in many ways.

On the ride back I took a detour onto very rural Lousetown Road—God, I think I was born a hundred years too late—which takes you out deep into Nowheresville. I was traveling through the Great Basin highlands—at about 6,000 feet—and as I angled back toward my eventual junction with Geiger Grade, I passed a sign saying, "Caution: Wild Horse Crossing." Shortly thereafter, there they were—a small herd of about 15 feral horses. They live out here, and have for hundreds of years. Originally they were strays from the Old World horses the Spanish brought over in the 16th century. There was a sorrel mare ready to foal, and two young foals, one about two months old, the other barely three weeks old. The young ones still had their deep fur. This was Nevada at its best.

I rode back into town, showered, checked out of my motel, and got onto #395 heading south. Will gambling ever loosen its stranglehold on Reno? I had my serious doubts. Just then I passed a big, new, modern building. Obviously a corporate headquarters of some business not having anything to do with slot machines or blackjack tables. The sign on the front said, "iGO.com." Whaddya know.

HOMEWARD BOUND

Passing through the radius of your home region on the way out of town is a great feeling. The elastic snaps and you're free. Inside the radius you feel the pull. It's a gravity-type thing. My radius is three hours. Any closer than that and I'm still "local." You can tell me I’m on vacation all you want, but I'll still feel home's unfortunate tug—and its pressure. I'm not on vacation if I can get home within three hours. It's not a distance thing. If I drive for one hour and hike for two, I'm outside of my radius

The "home radius" is determined by the how fast you can get home, using the fastest feasible conveyance, from where you happen to be. Cycling three hours from home, therefore, doesn't get me outside my home radius. This is why it's hard for me to successfully ride a road trip from home.

On this trip I burst through the three-hour mark like it was the sound barrier. The sky opened above me (as it would even if it was cloudy). But, as we know, all celestial forces even out. Once the centrifugal force of home is loosed, its centripetal force sets in. I no longer feel the pressure of home. I now feel the longing for home. This is not an even swap. The latter is preferable. And necessary, or else we'd always be on a road trip.

I am a homebody at heart. (This is not the same as a "settler;" more on that later). You can't point me toward home without the scent of the barn taking over, and once I've got up a head of steam there's no turning back. So when I pointed my truck southbound on the #395, there was no question where I'd next lay my head down.

Once about 15 years ago I tried to count how many times I've driven the stretch of Highway 395 from Reno-Tahoe to SoCal. It's the fastest route between those two points. At that time I'd counted something more than two dozen one-way trips. (Sometimes I'd break up the monotony by returning through California's Central Valley.) By now I must have driven it 40 times.

Somehow, though, I'd never noticed a lot of stuff that I noticed this time. First off, of course (to anyone who’s driven it looking anywhere other than at the double-yellow) the scenery is breathtaking all the way from Carson Valley to Bishop. This where all the passes are on this road—five of them in total. The average elevation during this stretch is about 6,500 feet above sea level, and the highest pass is well over 8,000 feet. So while this road is the quickest, it also has its perils. Going over Devil's Gate and Deadman Summit can be a little dicey in the winter.

The Sierra are a gentle slope from the west. If you look on a map you'll notice several roads crossing the Sierra. The busiest route is Highway 80, from Sacramento to Reno, just north of Lake Tahoe. Moving southward, there is Highway 50, through South Lake Tahoe. Those roads across are Donner Pass and Echo Summit, respectively. Everything southbound is a "pass," and they are, in order: Carson, Ebbets, Monitor, Sonora, and Tioga. If you were to look at these on a map, you'd see that all these climbs-descents travel about 60 to 80 miles between the western foothills—their eastbound climbing starts at California's Highway 49—and Highway 395, where they all come to their eastern terminus. You might expect these roads to summit midway between these two points. But they don't. All these passes top out quite close to #395. A cross-section of the Sierra Nevada range looks like a rubber doorstop, with the western slope resembling the wedge you stick under the door. The eastern slope is the part that you kick with your foot—almost straight up and down.

The eastern slopes are in a rain shadow, and are therefore more sparsely forested. Climbing these passes from the east resembles the scenes you see from the Tour—of the Alps—and from the Giro—of the Dolomites: few trees, windswept, deep blue sky. And they are steep. Turning off #395 toward Sonora Pass, a big green sign warns you before you get a quarter-mile up the road: "Steep grade, 26%." You figure somebody must have made a mistake. They must mean 6 percent. Or 16 percent. Nothing is 26 percent. Climbing Sonora, you feel assured it was a mistake, because it isn't 26 percent either. Until you get to the very top, at which point you feel like Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer.

Many a mid-20th century Western was filmed in a flattish valley against a backdrop of huge, snow-capped peaks that shoot up vertically in the distance, filling the background from one end of the panoramic screen to the other. These mountains are almost certainly the eastern Sierra. There is no other such vista in America. While the "town" in these movies is probably somewhere east of the Owens Valley, off from the mountains themselves, #395 hugs the edge of them for 300 miles. If you want to get to the highest peak in the lower 48 states, you don't get there from Yosemite, Sequoia, or King's Canyon. You come over to this side of the range. From brown, dusty Lone Pine, through which #395 rolls, you see people craning their necks, looking almost straight up, trying to figure out which of the craggy peaks more 11,000 feet above Lone Pine's 4,000-foot elevation is Mount Whitney.

But my favorite stretch of #395 is well north of that. I like the part from Topaz Lake (the California-Nevada state line) to Bridgeport. The highway parallels the Walker River most of the way. The Sierra are incredibly steep here. This time I was zipping along at 60 mph, looking at the river, the jeffrey pines, and all the huge cottonwoods, when it seemed to me I saw a yardful of bird houses. My wife loves birdhouses. Our back yard is littered with them. I slowed, swung the truck around, and idled back.

Sonny is not unlike Walter Huston in "High Sierra." White grizzled beard and all that. He scours the hillsides and abandoned shacks for old lumber, petrified juniper, scrap metal from decades gone by, and every manner of detritus that—when fitted onto one of his birdhouses—might attract an avian boarder... and a motorized passer-by. Sonny builds them two-story, four-story, six-story, condo-style, split-level, landscaped—however you, and the bird, would want it. I chose a mid-price range job, one which can house six mated pairs, arranged on four stories, all with their own floors, roofs, walls and perches. Sonny gave me the rundown on where the19th century lumber came from, and the etymology of the Sears and Roebuck plaque that—Sonny says—came from a windmill. Sonny makes bird feeders, too. He sells them, but they're also in use prior to the sale, as are his birdhouses. Pinon jays were gathering, Hitchcock-style. He filled up his feeders with seed, and his house was suddenly Studio 54 of the Sierra: anybody who was anybody with feathers showed up. Hundreds of them.

Sonny makes outdoor houses. His wife Liz makes more refined, indoor houses. Single-family dwellings only. I bought one of those, too.

This is par for the course around here. Topaz, Walker, Coleville, do not have any industry. A little fishing, a little camping, and that's it. So everybody's a craftsman. A little further down the road is a guy who makes those whirligig things for your yard. Antiques. Crafts. Stuff like that. You shop at 65 miles an hour.

The route is like that all the way to Mammoth. Then it's the big drop from over 7,000 feet to Owens Valley at 4,000 feet. Bishop is at the top of the valley, and there's a hundred or so miles of it until it falls down into the Mojave Desert. The Owens Valley separates the Sierra Nevada range from the White Mountains to the east, which, at over 12,000 feet in elevation, are almost as high as their much better-known cousins to the west.

If you travel 40 miles past Bishop to Big Pine (all 200 yards of it) and turn left, there is a lonely sliver of road that travels east up into the White Mountains. Go there (I did, two years ago) and you travel up, up and over a hump that'll lead you down into the middle of Nevada. But at the top of this road, another, smaller paved road veers left. Up it goes into a forest of short, scraggly pinon pines and Utah junipers. At 9,000 feet of elevation even these hardy trees disappear. At 10,000 feet the scrub peters out. It's positively lunar. But the road still ascends, around one bend, then another. Finally, at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet, as the road seems ready to crest the range, past one final bend, you emerge into a pine forest. These are bristlecone pines, the world's oldest living things. They live long because there is simply nothing up here that can prey on them. Almost nothing lives up here at all. This hilltop is so cold, so windblown that the bristlecones have only a six-week growing period each year. So they don't grow much. The tallest of these, at only 25 or so feet in height, had already lived half their lives by the birth of Christ. Trees now living on this hillside were alive through the entire birth, height, and death of the Assyrian, Hittite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman civilizations. It is an awesome thing to sit at the feet of a great Sequoia tree. It is just as awesome a thing to sit amongst these.

Funny thing: There is a signpost, at the Big Pine turnoff on the #395, pointing toward the bristlecone pine ancient forest. Planted and cultivated right next to the sign is a giant sequoia. Odd.

The Owens Valley used to be much wetter than it is now. Owens Lake used to be here. Now it is Owens sink. A certain William Mulholland—for whom "the drive" is named—conceived of a plan to essentially swipe the Owens Valley's water. Which he did. The movie "Chinatown" more or less follows this story line. One might argue in retrospect whether this early 20th century thievery was a good or bad thing. It is a pure example of ends justifying the means. If you live in L.A. you have William Mulholland to thank for your water. It used to belong to the Owens Valley, and now it belongs to you.

I was now past what used to be huge Owens Lake and cruising just west of Little Lakes. A restaurant used to be there. It's now a burned-out hulk. How long ago has it been this way? Ten years? Fifteen? I don't even want to know. I hope it wasn't more than 20 years ago. Too vivid is my memory of eating here during my north-south trips.

I got to thinking about home. The nature of home. What was I all in a rush to get to? Especially because I'm not a "settler." I have itchy feet. This drives Julie nuts. We've lived in our house for about seven years. This is nearing my all-time record, which I set when I was 13. My adult dwelling longevity record, prior to this, was more like two years. I'm a mover. I'm a wanderer, a travelin' man, a ramblin' man. Just like Dion, Ricky, and the Allman Brothers. "Home" shouldn't mean that much to me.

It sounds trite, but I guess I never thought about it before. I don't care about the house. Home is where Julie is. And where six dogs will greet me like I've been gone four years, not four days. But then, they greet you like that if you've been gone four hours. I fell out of the valley and onto the high plateau that is the Mojave Desert. I had two options: straight and I'd shoot over Highway 14 and through Lancaster (home of Lance Campers; I'd just LOVE to get an ad deal with them, and a bro deal on a Lance Lite). Or, left, continuing on through the desert and through Johannesburg, the most scenically deserted modern ghost town in California, with the possible exception of Salton City. I veered left. I wasn't done with the desert yet. The fading sun was directly behind me. The afternoon light was starting to fail, and the black crags of the last of the Sierra sat in my rear-view mirror with an orange-red stencil plastered behind them.