Dear 2WheelTimes.com,
Thought your readers might enjoy a story and pictures from our annual Nevada Desert Dual Sport Ride. Details below...
Well, most details below: the one I left out is the fact that I am 70 years old and have been riding with the Mountaineers Motorcycle Club since 1977. One of our boys recently set the Motorcycle Land Speed Record at Bonneville: Mike Akatiff in the "Ack Attack" (Editor’s note: will research for future story).
I am recently back from 6 days (Oct. 9-14) at the Mountaineers Motorcycle Clubs’ annual Octoberfest camp-and-ride in the Nevada desert held this year about seven miles S/E of Silver Peak, NV. The town of Silver Peak is there because they’ve found and developed a pretty extensive lithium drilling operation that supports one business open to the public: a nice, homey bar (of course!) that, apparently as an afterthought, has some basic microwave food as well.
This is an area of Nevada that has seen a fair amount of gold mining activity over the years and the remains of those operations are easy to find. A perfect example of Nevada mining boom-and-bust still exists in Goldfield, NV, about 35 miles from camp by roads half of which are gravel and half paved. Very promising signs of gold were discovered there in late 1902; in 1903, it was a tent camp of 20 prospectors and by 1907, it was a booming town of over 20,000 people. An interesting variety of professions there: 49 saloons, 6 bakeries, 14 cigar stores, 17 laundries, and of course, 84 lawyers and 162 stock brokers.
I’ve learned that there was lots of mining stock speculation in those old gold boomtowns. It seems it was the venture capitalism/NASDAQ of its day, and made a lot of money for the brokers! Although the ore deposits were pretty well exhausted by 1910, when the population dropped to 4,800, they were still recovering gold there until 1940. The total recovered from 1901 to 1940 was about 90 million dollars but at today’s prices that would be 1.8 billion dollars.
Both Virgil and Wyatt Earp spent time here. Virgil was appointed a deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County in late 1904 and died of pneumonia in Goldfield in October 1905, with his wife of 32 years at his bedside. Wyatt left town soon after and died peacefully in Los Angeles in 1929, at the age of 80, having dodged almost as many bullets fired at him as a Marine on Iwo Jima. The population of Goldfield now is about 440.
This is our camp on Friday morning. You can’t help but notice the threatening clouds and I can assure you that all of us in camp noticed ‘em because it was very COLD, and windy to boot, and therein lies a tale. I traveled from Santa Rosa to camp with my riding buddy, Ray Bennett, in his rather smallish motor home. On Sunday morning, I woke up and took a peek out of my down sleeping bag at the atomic clock with date and temperature that I had set on the table across from the couch I was sleeping on. It registered 29 degrees. Working up a little courage, I quick stuck the upper part of my body and arm out of the bag and turned on the thermostat for the propane heater and heard the comforting sound of the fan starting up. I immediately withdrew back into the bag to wait for the temperature to come up to something near life sustaining. Ten minutes later, there had been no improvement and it dawned on me that, while I had heard the sound of the fan starting, I had NOT heard the sound of flame. You guessed it; we were out of propane, which meant no percolated coffee on the stove either. The nearest propane was in Tonopah, 60 miles one-way. So, after we got up and dressed in the freezing cold, we sat there, cold and coffee-less, talking over our lousy options when I heard the sound of a big pickup next to us start up as the two guys in it prepared to leave camp for home. They had a big 5th-wheel trailer behind the truck so I went out and asked if they had a spare propane tank, they could lend us and they did. I mean, talk about having dumb luck and being grateful.
Here I’m pointing at two hot tubs in an abandoned resort named Alkali about halfway from camp to Goldfield. Notice the cement pool in the background. The water in the pool was just tepid but in the tubs, it was almost too hot to get into. Nevertheless, they certainly served to warm our freezing hands after riding 20 miles or so at 50mph in that cold air. We actually hit snow flurries the previous morning; nothing serious, but enough to make me have to regularly swipe the thumb of my heavily gloved hand across my helmet visor to make for clear vision.
This is Tex Rickard's house in Goldfield. Tex was a fight promoter who arranged the Nelson-Gans fight here in 1906 that still holds the record as the longest professional fight: 42 rounds. Tex went on to manage prizefights at Madison Square Garden.
An entrepreneur from Las Vegas brought these Art Deco-style subway shelters from New York City to Goldfield for some reason. I think they're a fine example of the obsessive, admirable, weird, dreams that otherwise-normal people can develop in an evocative place like this.
This is the Goldfield Hotel which, in its heyday, 1907, was the finest such establishment between Chicago and San Francisco. It went downhill quickly after 1910 but enjoyed a brief resurgence during WW II when it housed Army Air Corps officers training at the Tonopah Airfield about 40 miles away. It closed in 1946 and remains closed.
And then on Monday, after almost all the Mountaineers had left, the weather of course turned perfect: Blue sky and 70 degrees and just enough breeze to blow the dust of the rider in front of you off the trail. The four of us guys remaining in camp rode some miles up into the hills on bad gravel roads to visit an old cabin used by cattle ranchers in the middlin past. There was a corral and outhouse, soup and coffee cans in the pantry, and a stack of newspapers from 1991.
On a previous ride, one of the guys had spotted this hole-y rock and led the four of us back there. My guess would be that this is solidified volcanic mud and ash that has had the softer spots weathered out over the centuries. Surprisingly, there is evidence of lots of volcanic activity in Nevada.
My buddy and I had ridden past this example of abandoned mining activity looking for a much more developed site that other riders had told us about. The gravel road got worse and worse until it kind of went in several ugly directions so we stopped and parked'em to make a decision. In front of us was a bit of a spring feeding water down a tight, rocky canyon that allowed a fair amount of greenery with some small pools. Our attention was on spotting a continuing road and it took us a moment to realize there were 4 or 5 Bighorn Sheep, with large, curly horns, maybe 100 yards down the canyon. They wanted no part of us and agilely moved up the rocky mountainside where they joined maybe 25 of their mates and ran over a ridgeline and out of our sight. That's the first time in 30-some years of desert riding that I've seen such a sight and it was impressive. We then made our way back down the road and took this picture of the abandoned site. Notice the layered cement pads/foundations for a stamp mill and leach pads on the right and the ore car rail trestle about center. That's me an my trusty (superb, really) single-cylinder, 650cc BMW Dakar in the foreground. I had my wooden saddlebags mounted for carrying desert essentials and to act as crash bars in the likely case of a crash, I'm relieved to report, that never came. I managed to ride from Friday morning thru Monday afternoon and didn't flop it a single time. Will wonders never cease!
A couple of incidental facts: I bought a Las Vegas newspaper while there and found this interesting article reporting the decline of Nevada gambling revenue due to the current economic situation. They reported gaming revenues statewide in August were $934 million, the lowest monthly total since June 2006 when casinos won $921 million from gamblers. The 8.1% statewide decline, compared with the $1.016 billion casinos won from gamblers in August 2007, was not unexpected. The key words here are: Casinos won from gamblers. Wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said; “there’s a gambler born every minute!?”
In addition, the Mountaineers suffered one casualty during the O’Fest: A rider, not paying proper attention, hit a bowling ball-sized rock at 50mph, went head-over-teakettle and broke his leg, several ribs, and badly banged his shoulder. Other than that hope to see you on the next ride!
Wayne Bonkosky
2WheelTimes.com wants to spend a big "Thank You" out to Wayne for this fine story about Nevada Dual Sporting! Thanks again Wayne and we look forward to your next story.
Editor
