Ok, It's Lonely

U.S. Highway 50 in Nevada is billed as “The Loneliest Road in America.”

What a great PR gimmick. Take a negative comment by AAA reported in a 1980’s Life magazine article and make it a selling point. Chambers of commerce and others along the road started handing out “Highway 50 survival kits.”

Heading east between Reno and Fallon there is urban sprawl and heavy traffic. You get the notion that you’ve been sold a bill of goods. “Patience, grasshopper.”

Between Fallon in the west and the Utah border on the east, you think these guys might have been right.

It is lonely.

On a motorcycle it is fun.

If you’re ever looking for a road where you can ride a motorcycle 100 miles per hour, other than the one between Albuquerque and Santa Fe we used when I was a kid, Highway 50 might be the ticket. Understand I’m not encouraging you to ride a motorcycle that fast. But, if you ever wanted to.

The fast parts of the road are straight, flat, in good condition and empty. And, you can see 10 miles down the road. There are no trees, no berms, no billboards. Just wide open spaces.

If you get tired of going fast, this road is for you too. The road runs at right angles to about five mountain ranges. The passes over these ranges are higher than any mountain on the east coast.

The roads leading to and coming down from these passes have steep grades and hairpin turns and switchbacks.

If your mental image of a map of Nevada is like mine, there is a neon sign down at the bottom near the point for Las Vegas and everything is a brown, flat, out there wasteland.

That map is wrong. At least in years like this when there has been snow and rain. The valleys that run between the five mountain ranges are covered with green grasses and wild flowers. The vistas are magnificent whether you’re in the valley looking up at snow-capped peaks, or on the mountain looking down a valley that stretches to the horizon.

Make no mistake, there is a lot of out there out there. Why do you think all of those hotshot fighter pilots go out there for training and the Top Gun competition? If you are agoraphobic, let someone else drive while you nap.

There are also funky places to stop. Prostitution is legal in Nevada. The whorehouses even say they sell T-shirts. Anne and I stopped in one in Beatty some years ago to buy a T-shirt. They took our money, but never sent us the shirts. Those dirty whores.

I didn’t do any research on whether there were bordellos on Highway 50, but some of the places along the road looked to me like they had too many cars and RVs in front of them to be selling only gasoline and snacks. I had a similar thought about a place I passed on the Dalton Highway, but there are some questions that should be avoided lest the truth get in the way of a good story. Bill Fox told me that.

My favorite stop in Nevada was in Austin. The town is about 100 yards long, split by the highway. Everything on the north side of the road is uphill. Everything on the south side is downhill.

Part of the reason I liked Austin was because I stopped at the Toiyabe Cafe for a cup of coffee and a freshly-baked cinnamon roll. The restaurant had a supply of pamphlets from the local chamber of commerce which included the work of Jim Andersen describing what it was like to live in Austin. I don’t want to steal too much of Jim’s fine work, but here’s a sample. “Like an Easter egg hidden on a billiard table, Austin is hard not to find. All motorists traversing U.S. Highway 50 eventually funnel onto Main Street, Austin, whether they want to or not.” If you want more, you can write the Chamber of Commerce at Box 212, Austin, NV 89310 for a copy of “Lost in Austin.”

I also bought a T-shirt in Austin, but took immediate delivery.

When I got to Ely I was tired. I needed a nap. I found a park covered in thick, green grass next to a baseball field, rolled up my jacket for a pillow and took a power nap. A National Guard sergeant let me into the armory to use the rest room, and then I was on my way east into a thickening haze of smoke coming north on the wind from wildfires burning along the Utah border.

Then there was the most unusual road hazard of the trip so far. At first I thought I was seeing loose gravel on the road. Loose gravel on pavement is a significant problem for motorcycles, especially when turning.

This stuff didn’t look like the light colored rocks I was seeing along the route, so I thought it might be some decorative stone, perhaps volcanic, that was being hauled from the area. After seeing the stuff on the ground for many miles, and noticing that it didn’t behave like gravel when I rolled over it, I took a closer look.

The stuff was moving. I wasn’t seeing a truck load of gravel spread over miles of highway. I was seeing what looked to me to be grasshoppers. Grasshoppers by the millions spread out along Highway 50. Obviously not the loneliest road in America for bugs.

At the Toiyabe Café I learned that these creatures swarming across the road were related to grasshoppers, but were locally called “Mormon Crickets.” Once I heard cricket I recognized the aroma that had been in the area. The fresh scent of sagebrush and other desert plants had been overridden by the smell of a bait shop cricket box.

I had called these things a road hazard because if you squash a bunch of them with your tires, say in the middle of a turn, the coefficient of friction changes dramatically, and your bike slides. Your tires might be gripping the bugs, but the bugs aren’t gripping the road for you.

After Nevada I was planning to head more or less diagonally across lower Utah to pass through Capitol Reef National Park, the Valley of the Gods and Monument Valley, but a combination of nightfall and another violent thunderstorm resulted in a change of plans. I got on I-70 and headed almost due east. At Green River I called it a night.

And, it had been more of a night that I had sought. As I-70 descends from 11,000 foot mountains east of Salina there is a long, steep, twisting downhill stretch that would be fun to ride on a sport bike on a dry day. It was not nearly so much fun at night, in a thunderstorm on a fully loaded endurance tourer.

You would be reasonable to ask why I didn’t stop. There were no towns. The highway rest areas were all on the tops of mesas exposed to the lightening. My options were limited to facing the lightening on an exposed mesa or trying to slowly ride down the mountain. I chose the latter.

If you haven’t ridden a motorcycle you may not appreciate the quandary presented by riding a curving road at night. To turn a motorcycle you lean in the direction of the turn, you don’t turn the handlebar. The tighter the turn, the steeper your angle of lean needs to be. If you go too slowly, you fall over. While you are leaning over to take the turn, your lights are pointing straight ahead. Add rain and passing vehicles to this mix and your heart rate goes up while your grip tightens.

As I was negotiating this challenge a car pulled up close behind me with its high beams on. The car stayed with me all the way down the mountain without dimming its lights. In a car I might have been annoyed. On the bike I was most appreciative because the extra light made the ride easier. When we got down on the flats and the car passed me I understood why I had been followed. The car was towing a motorcycle trailer, and the driver of the car was providing anonymous assistance to a fellow rider. Thanks.