Owyhee Biking Adventure, September 08

Phew! I'm actually on line and typing a blog-quite the accomplishment when your Internet transmits from an office around the corner in a different building. The connection comes and goes of its own free will. And then there are the viruses the CIA plants in my hard drive... Roughly half the time I log on to Engage an error screen pops up and shuts down my connection. I imagine Dick Cheney huddled in his command center laughing every time it happens.

So Dick, do you want to hear about my weekend Owyhee Adventure? Maybe the rest of you'd be interested...

On Saturday Fern and I did some epic mountain biking in the Owyhees. The fun began before we saddled up. There's a dirt road that takes travelers up onto rolling sagebrush plateaus above the fertile Snake River plains. Its called Poison Creek Road. There's a fork in the road near where it pitches up into the hills. If you go right you'd better have a truck with reasonable ground clearance because there's a ridiculously steep but short bit of track to navigate. If you go left you pass by a house and a half dozen no trespassing signs. So Saturday morning Fern and I found ourselves puzzling over which way to go. Given that I was the official planner/navigator for our destination, I made the executive decision to proceed left. Fern, being the law-abiding citizen that she is, momentarily resisted my direction. I insisted that it was OK because the road before us just HAD to be Poison Creek Road, SURELY the other bit of undrivable road behind the house could not. Maybe, I reasoned, the no trespassing signs referred to the land and house on either side of the road. I was proven wrong moments later. The proof came in the form of a mustachioed white guy in a bath robe running out of his house, flailing his arms, and yelling something we couldn't make out. We stopped and I stuck my head out the driver side window. I pleaded ignorance; "Isn't this Poison Creek Road?," I asked. "No!", the belligerent home owner yelled, "That's why there are no trespassing signs back there!" I apologized and asked him if he wanted us to back up or if it was OK to just continue forward. He indicated that we might as well continue forward by flailing his arms up the road in a very huffy manner.

Well, things had become rather tense very quickly; and as we proceeded up the road, I'm sorry to say they remained tense for several more minutes. The road condition was much worse than I expected, and Jennifer's cute but able Toyota Corrolla was a bit out of its element. The road was steep and rocky and featured the occasional sand/dust pit. For a while we didn't know if we were going to make it up. Alas, after a few undercarriage scrapes and much puckering of our A-holes, the road improved. We drove for a few more miles and parked. I was really hoping the ride would be a great one so that we could leave the morning's anxieties behind.

The ride was awesome and by the time it was done, we could laugh about the belligerent property owner. We covered the first five miles of the ride in no time. I noticed early on that Fern was really cruising. I theorized that she was in excellent shape due to a lot of consistent riding. It was either that or her newly working cyclometer was motivating her to keep the digits up. At any rate, we were really hauling ass.

At mile five we turned left off of Sands Basin Road and enjoyed several miles of pleasant double track. We did come upon a place where the road became solid lava rock. That was fun and challenging to ride. At one point, in the distance, we noticed a group of horses. We surmised that they were some of the wild horses that inhabit the Wild Horse Management Area of the Owyhees. Later, we saw several more horses. This time it became apparent that they were standing on the road that we intended on using ourselves. So at a safe distance we stopped and made some noise. (we had no idea if the wild horses could be aggressive) The horses stared at us nervously for several moments and then trotted quickly up a hill. This gave Fern and I room enough to proceed. The horses looked down on us from atop the hill as we rode by. I kept an eye on them for a moment and was shocked to see them turn around and running directly towards us. For a few moments I imagined what it would be like to be attacked and trampled by a band of wild horses. Thankfully, the weird creatures thundered down the hill well behind us. I assumed that they have a keen sense of the lay of the land and the safest areas to position themselves in relation to any threat. Either that or they sought the safety of the larger group after being scared by the almighty Joshifer on wheels.

We continued to ride and I continued to check our map to make sure we were on the route I had in mind. Along the way I missed seeing a faint track on our left and so I become increasingly confused when eyeing the map. At an intersection we took a left but I knew it wasn't the road I had wanted to find. The road forced us down and up some very steep hills. We did quite a bit of hike-a-biking. We were feeling pretty good, so we were OK with it. But just when I was getting really confused about where we were, my rear tire hit a big rock and pinched my tube.

Now its not like we were lost in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I knew we were within 10 miles of the valley and civilization. But I was still concerned because the Owyhee Mountains/Plateaus are scarred by deep, sheer canyons that are nearly impossible to climb down or up in spots. There were several creeks in the area that fell into these sorts of canyons. The big one was Jump Creek Canyon. From our perspective we couldn't get a good sense of the exact location and depth of the canyons in the area. At that moment, it was entirely possible that we could end up dragging our bodies for miles and miles all over the area in search of a route back to the car. And it was possible that it would be done hiking with our bikes, since I had yet to fix the flat.

So that was the dire situation we were facing. But thanks to some flat repair supplies and wise decision making on Fern's part, we avoided the worst and had a very pleasant, moderately tough ride back to the car. While I was fixing the flat, an ATV rider rolled up and we had a nice chat. He gave us some valuable (but incorrect) information about the various routes we could take, and we decided to simply backtrack to guarantee no further wandering. We had already ridden our bikes around 15 miles and we were feeling good, so we reckoned 15 more was doable.

By the time we got back to the car, we had covered over 30 miles and were feeling very accomplished. And finally we were able to drive out of the Owyhees along an alternative route than the one we came in on. It was a smooth, safe, and legal drive, which again, I felt pretty good about.