Day Five May 20th
....."I was totin my pack along the dusty Winnemucca road".... or so the Jonny Cash masterpiece goes....I thought to myself as I actually drove along the dusty Winnemucca road:bike_rider: With Mr. Cash still belting out his hits on our Ipod we arrived in Winnemucca, a sleepy farm town/truck/train depot along I-80. We pulled into a gas station after burning what we thought was going to be the most fuel on the longest stretch we had thus far traveled between stops. As we were gassing up, a guy who was topping off his cowboy Cadillac across from me proudly proclaimed that my Jeep is what they are supposed to look like, he was refering to the 2 states worth of mud and dirt covering everything. I must have paid an extra $40 in gas just to haul 400 pounds of Arizona this far north into Nevada. Again I was asked about the trasharoo, I explained what it was for, he looked intreagued, than looked at his pickup truck, no need for a trasharoo there...
I called my dad before we left town to let him know we were ok and we were having a blast, I also gave him a rough estimate of the direction we would be traveling and where we hoped to end up that night.
We pressed on north out of town on Jungo road heading to the ghost town of Jungo, when we arived at the dot on the map that said "Jungo" we found no town, what we did find was a huge dry lake bed called Jungo Flat, we took this opportunity to let the massive horsepower "snort" of our Jeep JK's 3.8 liter minivan engine run free! Across the lake bed we went setting land speed records and doing wide sweeping turns, it was thrilling. We stopped to take a few pictures and pop off a few rounds from my Sprigfield XD-9 and Nolas 357 magnum. Dry lakebeds are perfect ranging and testing grounds for different types of ammo because you can see exactly where and how far bullets travel. That was fun! On the edge of the lakebed we discovered an abandoned 50's era Buick, this beast had more steel in the front fender than my whole jeep had in its body, it was massive covered with rust yet the chrome still gleamed in the sun. America could build some cars back then! After our diversion on the lakebed we started north towards the biggest mountains we had seen so far on our trip, following Bottle Creek Road we moved quickly, this was a nice smooth graded dirt road. I've got to add here that this (to me) seemed to mark our entering into the north country, the air fealt different, there was green grass, the cows were fatter, and there were flowing streams everywhere. We turned onto Nevada highway 140, another beautifully graded dirt road (Nevada takes care of their trails nicely) and headed towards Denio Junction near the Oregon Border. We turned left and continued to follow 140 across another picturesque mountain valley, while in the valley we stopped for lunch, more hot dogs and even more beans hehehe!:costumed-smiley-007 After lunch we followed our trusty GPS onto what looked like a gently sloping mountain pass. Dear reader we climbed 5 thousand feet in about 5 miles in 4 low crawling the entire way, we crossed snow patches that were more like glaciers! We'd reach the crest of one ridge only to see more climbing and more crawling, 2 hours later we pointed the nose down the other side of the mountain pass, riding the brakes in 4 low down the hill into yet another awesome mountain valley, this time Nola proclaimed we can see Oregon! We drove on up the trail passing nicely laid out camp sites and Kiosks that detailed local wild life and posted vague park service maps of the area. (does anyone use these? most of the ones in Arizona are riddled with bullet holes) We crossed into Oregon on Coleman Canyon road pushing north towards Adel. Oregon is much wetter than I'm used too, what they call streams here are raging rivers in AZ. I'm used to being able to jump across a stream, you could sail a destroyer up these creeks! Needless to say being a stranger in a strange land (Im a desert rat mind you) we stuck to the pavement. We had hoped to get gas in Adel but there wasnt a single open gas station in town, so we pressed our luck, and our range, and headed towards Paisley, we actually started thinking about what we would do if we ran out of gas here, the low level light was on and we had 95 miles to go before the next gps located gas station,we werent going to make that. Thankfully Paisley did have a gas station. I must state here that I think Oregons full service gas station law is silly! The attendant was nice and I stood next to the pump awkwardly as this guy pumped my gas for me, essentialy doing my work. Noone has yet been able to explain this law to me, does Oregon not trust its citizens to pump their own gas? This was not the last Oregon law I would have trouble with.....
After we got gas we decided to try some trails, after all thats what we were here for, one forest road after another petered out into a locked gate or an impassable river. We were running out of daylight and we had to be in Portland that night.
We hit the highway up 97 thru Bend then Madras, at Madras we turned onto 26 and headed towards Mt Hood and Portland, it was dissapointing becasue by now it was dark and raining hard as we passed Mt Hood, we never got to see its magestic peak. While on the highway, a friend I went to highschool with back in New Mexico who was following our trip on facebook offered us her spare bedroom in Portland! That was great becasue we realy had no clue where we were going to sleep that night. We finaly made it to her apartment deep in the heart of downtown Portlandia. We parked the Jeep on the street in front of her building, grabbed a few bags of clothes and our air matress and followed Rose up to her place, it was 0130. A little small talk and a beer or two later and Nola and I were ready for some sleep! We were dead to the world once we hit the matress. I did get a discusted giggle out of hNola right before we drifted off to sleep, the lunch beans strike again! haha!:chef: We slept like babies............
we finaly found Gold Point. There looked to be some overlander types camped out in Gold Point and it would have been great to stop and hang out, but we were burning daylight and had a ways to go before camp. We moved still northwest towards Lida. where we turned up into a massive mountain pass stopping for dinner at the top, Hot Dogs and yes, more beans:Wow1:. After the pass we crossed another massive wide valley and entered Silver Peak, nothing to see here folks, just a small (still working) mining town and you'd think they way they looked at my jeep that the circus had come to town. We passed right on through and headed to Tonepah. Ariving in Tonepah well after dark, 2130ish we got gas and talked for a few minutes with the girl behind the counter at the gas station, everyone in Tonepah seemed freindly and it was actualy a cool looking town with a classic main street feel. Nola and I looked at eachother and niether one of us was tired, maybe we were running on the excitment of what we were discovering. We pressed on through the night, heading still north west towards Winnemocca. This was by far the longest stretch of unbroken dirt we drove on so far, over 200 miles of it! The road was so straight I could have set the cruise control and riden on the roof of the jeep for hours. At about 0300 I had had a long enough day behind the wheel, we pulled off and unloaded the jeep and inflated out air matress in the back of it. It was perfect, easier than the tent and was better shelter, again we slept like babies, untill about 0730 when we were awakened by a nest of vultures in the tree we parked under. We watched in awe as 4 baby vultures squawked for food from mom who was out somewhere scavenging. And folks yes, even baby vultures are cute in their own way....
