day # 3

View Larger Map

big day today. point-to-point is only 170mi., but i was held to a pretty slow pace on the alternate route from Paisley to Lakeview, so i was in the saddle all day, right up to sunset. thats why this was my first motel night. 

  My first crisis/scary moment happened just outside of Paisly, OR on my way to Lakeview on the scenic alternate route of Rd. 33. As i rounded a blind right hand curve about 5 miles from Paisley i came face-to-face with a speeding truck, fully loaded with timber on his way down the mountain cutting the corner into my lane. the road at this point was a single-lane paved route with turn-outs, and this rig had crossed the centerline and was going about 60 verses my 45MPH. in the space of about half a second, or around 250 feet i managed to counter-steer the shit out of the bike and lurch onto the shoulder in time for him to blast by me and i cleared the left side of his rig with only inches to spare. i actually jabbed at the 'bar 3 times until i got the bike to change direction that severely. if i had been any further into the left side of the lane or had hesitated at all i would have surely collided with the grill of his rig. it was probably the closest i've ever come to a head-on collision. it took several seconds for the rush of adrenaline to hit and i was overcome with a wave of cold sweat and a pouding heart. after that, the road was deserted and i made it to Lakeview, but the anxiety of the whole thing left me very tense. 

  Once into Alturas, i wasted at least two or three hours searching for a handful of campgrounds that were either missing or closed in the hills around Alturas and Canby. i guess this was the first time i got a little lost, searching for Cottonwood Flats campground, but i was really lost so much as the road ended up taking much longer than i thought it would. the actual mileage for that day was more like 280 or so. i was exhausted, so i just paid the $55 for a room and walked down to the store for some beer and water. on my way there, as i passed a trailer park down the street from my motel, some crackhead d-bag started shouting out at me, "hey! hey, dickweed! hey! you! i'm talkin' to you! hey faggot!" i couldnt believe i was actually being called a "dickweed". i dont think i've heard anyone use that as a serious taunt or insult since 1989. down the street at the corner gas station a posse of local boy-ranchers had corralled their pickups like covered wagons and sat there, leering at me between hee-haws and racial slurs as i passed. in the store the clerks mad-dogged me all the way from the front door to the beer cooler, then avoided eye contact as they took my money at the register. on the way back to my room the crackhead was gone, replaced by a pair of blood-thirsty rottweilers barely leashed to their trailer. back at the motel, the vacant rooms next to me had been filled by a crew of local cowboys passing through on their way between rodeos with all their horses and shit. they were sitting outside on their benches chewin' and spittin' and drawlin' all night about horses, trucks, and Mexicans. it was like i had been transported to the redneck olympics where every competitor was Slim Pickens from Blazing Saddles. totally bizarre. in the morning i cleared out by 8AM and made my way west, towards Redding...

day # 2

View Larger Map

Today i did some geologic sight-seeing and hit my first dirt roads. going east from LaPine on Finley Butte Rd. takes you to the South Ice Caves. this first section was really difficult because crews had just renewed all the gravel on this road and it was like riding in sand or really dry, deep snow. i had both feet out trailing along with my toes buried in the gravel like pontoons, teetering along at 15MPH as far from the center as possible. i was almost riding in the brush just to find some hard ground. it was incredibly tense for the first 10 miles or so, i had to stop and catch my breath a few times. i remember thinking that it was much harder than i remembered it being (riding off-pavement), and that maybe my tire choice was just totally wrong, but in hindsight, i dont think any DOT-approved tire would have made any difference. after a while the road firmed up and changed to more of the typical high-desert dirt/rock and was much easier. at the Ice Caves there are two volcanic tubes facing eachother inside the sinkhole, and the temperatures down inside were cold enough to see my breath. 

the closer i got to the openings the colder it got. considering it was in the upper 80s on the surface, it was pretty spooky.

further south on NFD 18 is Fort Rock, a volcanic formation called a tuff-ring. from Wikipedia:

Fort Rock is a volcanic landmark called a tuff ring, located on an Ice age lake bed in north Lake County, Oregon, United States.^[2] The ring is about 1,360 meters (4,460 ft) in diameter and stands about 60 meters (200 ft) high above the surrounding plain.^[3] Its tall, straight sides resemble the palisades of a fort, thus giving the rock its name. The region of Fort Rock Basin contains about 40 such tuff rings and maars and is located in the Brothers Fault Zone of central Oregon's Great Basin. On June 20, 1925, the Bend Bulletin wrote that Fort Rock was named by William Sullivan, an early resident.

  

i wish i had had time to hike inside, but i was running out of daylight soon and the skies were gathering clouds. it was clearly raining all around me so i figured it was best to keep moving...

  

as soon as i returned to pavement in the town of Fort Rock (a little south of the monument) and headed south on Hwy. 31 the weather turned to shit. there appeared to be two different rainstorms on either side of me, like a figure-eight with me bisecting it through the middle. somehow i missed both of them and only got a few small drops on me, blown over by the winds. as i crested a hill and saw down into the small valley ahead i could see what looked like a dust storm about a quarter-mile ahead. i couldnt figure out if it was dust or smoke, because it was both brownish and very thick...almost opaque. i ruled out smoke the closer i got because it was staying so close to the ground and i couldnt see any clear source, but but it was also so humid that a huge dust-bowl didnt seem likely either. about 3-4 seconds before i hit it i realized it was actually a very dense wall of water, wind, and dust swirling around like a frickin' tornado. i had just enough time to utter some profanity and throw my weight forward and down behind the screen to stabilize the front end before i slammed into it at 65MPH. it was like i had jumped into a swimming pool and a wind tunnel all at once. big peanut-sized rain drops, wind gusts from all sides, deafening noise; if the bulk of the wind blast had not (by luck) come from the front of me and instead from the side i would have surely been knocked off the bike, it was that violent. i slowed to 45, a controllable speed, hid behind the screen, and wobbled my way down the highway until it calmed. luckily it only lasted about a mile, then the skies actually cleared and were mostly blue. the road was soaked and foamy with wheeltracks full of stormwater, but the rain was gone and the winds light. it was so weird i wasnt sure what to make of it. later that night the couple camping next to me on the lake said that they had been hit by it too with their camper-topped truck towing their little boat, and had as hard a time keeping it pointed straight. i recognized their truck as the one i had waved past as i was wobbling along at the shoulder. i thought about calling home to see if anyone could find any reports of a tornado near Silver Lake, but i forgot about it once the Hamms kicked in...

day # 1

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL-SIZE

  not much to say about the first day except it was fucking hot. over 100 in Prineville and stayed warm all night. look how clean i was!

below is a 3D map of the Crooked River Canyon where my campsite was, created using GoogleEarth:

vagabond opera 2008: redwoods

2198 - total miles ridden

183 - average daily mileage

55 - average MPG

12 - number of days on the road

7 - number of stream crossings

3-4 - number of hours spent lost on BLM roads

2 - number of near-collisions with other motorists

1 - number of bears seen

0 - number of flat tires

  

  Ever heard of the Jefferson State? In 1941, the Siskiyou Daily News printed this brief story about a small group of counties on either side of the Oregon/California border with big ideas:

HERE'S ONE for the book - the geography book. The new State of Jefferson has issued its Proclamation of Independence and will seek admission to the Union as the forty-ninth state. Jefferson is made up of rebellious northern California counties and one southern Oregon county. Yreka is the provisional capital of the secessionists. Lassen county brings into the new commonwealth the only active volcano in continental United States. The new state will have no sales tax and no income tax and no liquor tax, but will be financed through a small royalty on mining and timber developments. Strikes will be outlawed. Slot machines will be abolished as unfair competition to the stud poker industry of this "last frontier" area. The region is rich in timber, sugar pine, pine, oak, chrome, copper, manganese and gold. But until both Oregon and California consent to creation of the new state and Congress grants statehood, residents of the unhappy counties will continue to pay income, sales and liquor taxes, and perhaps, play the slot machine.

  Another, later map shows what is generally considered today to be the basic territory of the "Jefferson State":

  www.jeffersonstate.com  gives the following history of this movement:

There have been many attempts at forming a new state comprised of northern California and southern Oregon, but none has gained so much attention and retained it as the secession movement of 1941.

The abundant supply of minerals and timber in this region was largely inaccessible due to the lack of sufficient roads and bridges into the rugged mountain border country. The local pioneering people grew weary of unfulfilled promises from Salem and Sacramento to help fund sufficient highway projects in the region while building campgrounds in the cities where there were more votes.

Representatives from the mountain border counties involved met in Yreka, CA on November 17, 1941 to form an alliance to obtain federal aid for the construction and repair of bridges and roads. The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $100 to research the possibility of seceding from the state of California and joining the other counties to form a new 49th state.

Newsreels showcasing their secessionist plight were to air nationally the week of December 8, but tragically on December 7th Pearl Harbor was bombed and the State of Jefferson rebellion of 1941 came to an end. The people of the region went to work for the war effort and good roads were eventually built into the backcountry to access strategic minerals and timber. These same roads have helped countless numbers of rural families make a living from the land that continues to produce abundant, quality natural resources.

The State of Jefferson 'state of mind' remains in the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

  So i guess it would make more sense to call it vagabond opera 2008: Jefferson State...anyhoo, I'm going to try and write about some of it in the next few days, probably a different post for each day. I spent most of yesterday and today processing all my photos and videos taken, building an easily digestable album. i think the total count for stills was 347 and 5 or 6 videos. i've been experimenting with Apple's iDVD and put together a DVD slideshow with video clips and some basic menus. 

  A funny thing is that in terms of averages, they're all higher than last year's trip. i covered a little over half the miles in about a third of the time. even though my point-to-point distances were often much less, i did so much exploring and re-tracing my own path that my daily totals were very high...the mileage totals shown on the GoogleMaps samples are just A-to-B and dont include all the dicking around i was doing in the bush ... so to speak. 

  Everything went so well this time, i really didnt have any signifigant problems, or even minor ones. I had one very close encounter with a speeding logging truck, one freak weather occurrence, and only got lost in the woods once. No mechanicals or flats, no crashes, no theft or violence, no bad weather, no equipment failures, no $ problems ... i even slept a consistent 7 hours at night and seemed to be immune to hangovers. I did lose my knife, that sucked, but what i replaced it with is so much cooler, i dont even miss it. Oh yeah, I did get taunted by some crackhead from behind a fence as i walked past his trailerpark in Alturas, CA. I cant remember the last time i was called "dickweed" by someone who took it seriously as an insult. poor bastard. 

  

  

hilarious Mercenaries 2 ad

this song is some funny shit, the game looks pretty cool, too. the full length version can be found here. you can also download it from the studio's website here.

you aint got a prayer you owe meeeeeee!

tour of Olympic National Forest/San Juan Islands

View Larger Map

just an idea...