Started off with a hearty breakfast at the Fields Station. After last night’s late arrival and some general disorganization, we finally got rolling around 10:40, accompanied by a fellow ADVrider named Ken.
We detoured away from the TAT last night and this morning so that we could spend the night in Fields, because the only hotel in Denio was full.
The route that Tony came up with using our Benchmark atlas pages and the GPS turned out to be really pretty. The roads we were on late last night turned out to be way more primitive than suggested by the Benchmark map, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it hadn’t been dark.
We eventually connected back up with the TAT after Ken split off to go more directly towards Portland. The TAT wanders between Oregon and Nevada and briefly goes into California before going towards the middle of Oregon.
We came across this old cabin at a spring. Some other ADV people had left notes on the wall, so we did too.
As we were leaving the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, we came down off a plateau into a big valley. We saw a couple herds of antelope today, but none of the wild horses Tony was hoping for. We did see some of those yesterday - we saw a herd from a distance, and they ran over a ridge before we could snap more than one picture, then we saw two very close to the road because one was lame.
Tony was not well pleased with the road construction on Barrel Springs Road. These guys had no signs posted, and they had used a couple of graders to completely tear the gravel and base apart, then mound it up in a long loose pile. Can’t imagine how hard it would have been to ride a sport bike across that. This was another pretty valley just before we crossed into California.
Farewell Nevada, hello California.
We eventually arrived in Lakeview, OR via Catnip Reservoir in NV and the abandoned-feeling town of Fort Bidwell, CA. 173 miles in 7 hours.
It’s laundry day again in Lakeview, OR.
The sad thing about today is that this is the only photo I took.
Part of the ‘problem’ with Oregon is the trees - we rode mile after mile down roads like this, where through the occasional break in the trees you might see across a valley to another ridge covered in trees.
We did ride past Summer Lake, Thompson Res., and Klamath Marsh NWR, all of which might have been good photos, but we were in a hurry at those times. Neither of us realized that today’s ride would take as long as it did.
We started out following the TAT from Lakeview toward Chemult, but it started winding around on really small roads, so we switched to following one of the OBDR (Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route) tracks instead. However, after several miles, the OBDR track tried to send us down a road which didn’t exist. At this point we realized that we had made hardly any real progress toward Chemult and it was already well after noon. We decided to follow some main forest roads into Paisley and have lunch. There we studied the map and the GPS to find an efficient way back to the OBDR. After some struggling with the over-abundance of logging roads shown on the GPS, we eventually plotted a route and joined back up.
After following the OBDR past Thompson Res., we realized the sun was getting very low and making westward riding difficult, so we stuck to some main roads and got to the Crater Lake Lodge in Chemult before dark.
It was a bit chilly all day, especially some of the highway miles we did getting around Summer Lake from Paisley, so we finally put our jackets on mid-afternoon. It feels quite cold tonight, and the low is forecast to be 22 degrees. I thought August was still summer!
188 miles in 8 hours.
No way are we going to get an early start today! NWS says it is still 22 degrees at 7:00am.
We started day 13 following one of the OBDR tracks through several miles of this type of narrow road between lodgepole pine.
After a couple hours of OBDR, we realized that we were not making enough northward progress, so we hit some paved but interesting roads for a while (FS 19, the Aufderheide Road), then made a few ‘dirt connector’ routes between highways, one of which took us right past Wolf Rock, the largest monolith on Oregon.
Our ‘connector’ routes got us to Detroit, OR, where we split up and each headed home, in my case via about 150 miles of pavement. Fortunately, only about half of it was mind-numbingly straight, but it was all butt-numbing after spending so much time standing up riding on dirt.
We realized that we hadn’t put enough planning effort into the Oregon part of the trip, because the OBDR tracks had been longer in both cases than we assumed. Something to come back to and try again, and easier since it is closer to home.
An amazing trip, but it does feel good to be back home!
362 miles over 11 hours.