Nevada - Bad Day at Black Rock

by John Clark

I told the dapper little barber where I was heading.

"Whoa!" Sammy put down the electric shaver he had just picked up and thwacked his hand against his forehead. "You're not cycling to Gerlach? Across the Black Rock Desert? Hey, Roy...!"

After three months in the saddle I was treating myself to a shave, waiting for Winnemucca to wake up so I could buy supplies. A taller, thinner dapper barber appeared from the back.

"You serious?", Roy asked. "I mean, there's nothing out there except too much sun. People die out there, man."

This much I knew. Stories of motorists getting stranded in overheated cars and dying of dehydration had dominated the bar room conversation the previous evening. My confidence that cyclists are better equipped than drivers to undertake short desert traverses had taken a knock, but none of the chatty ranchers would have been seen dead on a bicycle. This crossing was a three-day journey, max.

"I drove through there once," Roy continued, "y' know, when I was going through a bad patch and needed to take off. I was on my own alright. Just driving it nearly killed me. Took me a week to recover."

A sheriff walked past on patrol. Sammy frantically beckoned him in and explained my intentions. The cop had never heard of anybody cycling further than the gold mine at Sulphur, on the edge of the playa, and washed his hands of all responsibility for my proposed insanity.

Meanwhile, Roy was on the phone to the Bureau of Land Management, caretakers of the wilderness, soliciting them to try and discourage me. In pastel cape and half-shaven face, I took the receiver.

"It's a tough one, but you might be okay," the ranger said. "You'll need plenty of water. There are hot springs along the way, but I don't know if they're drinkable."

I couldn't work out if people were laying it on thick or the route was lethal. Hot springs in an area with a mine called Sulphur could only mean the water was alkaline and undrinkable. I left in search of a bike store to purchase another Camelback.

The owner didn't bat an eyelid as I outlined my route. Chuck Austin had ridden to Sulphur and back, knew nobody who had completed the crossing to Gerlach, but couldn't think of any reason why it couldn't be done, other than the problem of water.

"In this sort of heat, you just can't carry enough liquid. I strongly recommend you don't set out until late afternoon."

It was 36ºC in the shade when I finally set out from the oasis of Winnemucca for 'Lucifer's Anvil'. The tarmac rapidly crumbled into a dirt road shadowing the line of the old Central Pacific Railroad. It climbed painfully over a rye softened ridge beside the rusting superstructure of a deserted gold mine. Hell-bent from the Sulphur mine, a couple of trucks thundered past and engulfed me in a sandstorm.

At the brow, the wind hit me with the force of an Amtrak. It was gusting at 60 mph and I was down to cycling slower than a walking pace. Since speed was the essence of my plan of attack, the cyclist's worse enemy was a worry. I considered turning back and trying my luck the following day, but there was every chance the winds which eternally strafed Nevada would be no better, maybe worse.

Beyond the ridge, the road curved down to a flat-bottomed expanse of sagebrush desert. For five excruciating hours I juddered along the washboarded trail spitting sand and cursing the enemy, the hood of my top smacking my ears like a sadistic school master. I willed the sun to hang fire in the sky but it was in cahoots with the gale. An eerie afterglow settled as it sank behind the saw-toothed Jackson Mountains, transforming mile upon mile of deadpan desert into a snowfield.

I was determined to reach Jungo. There was nothing there but, where the old mining town once stood, the track swung left to cross the railroad. In this world of nothing, it was something to aim for. Up ahead, I could see the headlights of a truck crossing the line before turning towards me. It appeared no further than a few hundred yards away. After what seemed like a week, the driver rattled past and showered me with dust. Resigned to falling short of my target, I turned off the track and crunched across cracked alkali to spend the night in the shelter of a scrubby iodine bush.

I fell asleep to the painful whine of the storm racing through the growth, and woke the next morning to the same nerve-racking shriek. I couldn't have felt more distraught if I had come to in a dentist's chair with the drill stuck in an old filling.

Without stirring a loin, I unzipped the tent. The wind ripped open the curtains on a raven trying to fly west above the course of the railroad track. It was tumbling backwards, chased by billowing clouds of sand. In my soul I surrendered, resigned to spending the day cowering under canvas. In my mind I knew that, if I did, I hadn't the water to survive an extra twenty-four hours on the crossing.

Daylight revealed I was three-quarters the way across the width of a playa which stretched south as far as the eye could see until the blade of an azure guillotine sliced it dead. Flanked by grey ranges of barren mountains, only the nipple of a lone stack rose above the ocean of alkali. With great reluctance. I squared up to the wind and cranked into the foothills.

My first sight of the starched white sheet of the Black Rock Desert reminded me of those Westerns where the villains are stood at the edge of the playa. weighing their chances of surviving the crossing against the slim chance of the posse following them into the cauldron. The distance to the Black Rock Mountains on the opposite side didn't appear far, but the heat haze wobbling at their base indicated I was looking at a deadly Nevada foreshortening, where a two day ride appears achievable in a couple of hours. In the foreground, a mile either side of the railroad track, a rumpled carpet of sand embedded with clumps of iodine and sagebrush needed to be negotiated before reaching the pan.

I struck out across the margin, dragging my bike through small but strength sapping dunes, wondering if I hadn't made a big mistake by leaving the established trail. The sun was at its highest and sweat flooded out of me. Beside the railroad line, telegraph poles provided a sliver of shade but nothing sufficient to shelter a body. I had passed Sulphur, the halfway point where sane cyclists turn back, and my water was two-thirds gone.

Between the scrub and zinc white desert, I had to squelch through a short transition of porridge. Where it stuck to bare skin, the alkali smarted. Forced further into the center of the playa to find a firm surface, I rode on a baked pan of cracked combs which sucked me dry of sweat. Dehydration was setting in. The line I took had previously been traveled by gold seekers bound for the California Gold Rush - a line littered with the corpses of cattle and men like an incubus guard of honour.

But for the wind and heat, the cycling was easy and the setting sublime. After an hour, however, it became samey, after two it got boring, and after three it was sending me loopy. A combination of wind resistance and my distorted perception of distance meant I was monitoring progress purely by watching the wheels go round.

The raw mountains either side barely changed. If I forced myself not to look to the right for half an hour, it was possible to detect a slight shift in the aspect of the distant landscape when I turned back. Looking ahead, my eyes were like a camera moving forwards while the zoom lens opened out. The depth of field was tearing open, but the subject wasn't getting any closer.

I was riding across the floor of a kiln, its fan was pushing the thermostat to the limit. Though I was slow to appreciate it, the heat and dust were taking a toll. My tongue began sticking to the roof of my mouth and stuff like dried snot sealed my lips.

My skin turned soapy where I sweated and itchy where I didn't. Initially I was taking a sip of water every fifteen minutes. By the time what I believed to be Gerlach shimmied to the horizon, I was sipping every twenty turns of the pedal and almost out of liquid. To my right, what appeared to be a lake lapped at the foot of the Granite Mountains, possibly the same illusion which drove cattle to stampede to their deaths when the wagon trains crossed the wasteland.

My water dried up as I crept past the mirage of Gerlach. The village transpired to be a line of low hummocks like the backbone of a buried dinosaur, topped with shriveled sagebrush. Ahead, white rectangles in a green blur suggested this time I really was approaching Gerlach, but desperately slowly. I had to discipline myself not to look to the front. On my left, the railroad was closing in on the village. I fixed on the telegraph poles to monitor progress, counting them off for something to do. Two hours later I was close enough to confirm the blur was the oasis.

Between myself and the gallon of root beer I had fantasized about for most of the day lay a moat of porridge. Whichever tack I took, I ran into gloop. Finally I gave up trying to pick my way through and slopped straight across three miles of alkali mud dragging the bike, not once thinking there might be quicksand lurking in my path. It was another hour and a half before I crawled up the beach to the isthmus of sand on which Gerlach rested. From knees down, my skin was on fire.

Caked in white mud, I staggered into a Texaco station which was more a garage with a broken drinks machine than a service station with a mini mart. The mechanic pointed me in the direction of Bruno's Bar. I tried hard to saunter in nonchalantly, but blew it when I fell against the bar and whispered through clagged lips, "Beer."