Day 1:
Desert scenery
In many of the pictures I took with Evan in them, he's looking at his phone. That's because every time we stop, he's looking at the GPS to navigate while I just stared around and took pictures.
A fun stream crossing
A less fun stream crossing. You never know how deep these mud bogs will be until you are stuck.
We took a break on the way up to Mt Patterson as it was pretty windy.
Heading up
It was lean-into-the-wind windy up at the 11,673 foot summit.
We didn't spend much time at the top, headed back down.
Desert scenery
We tried to take an alternate route that looked doable on the map, but ran into a locked private property gate, so had to backtrack.
Heading through an unlocked gate.
Replacing a cattle gate. We went through A LOT of gates.
Desert scenery
Mono Lake in the distance
After coming down out of the Sweetwater Mountains, we were making our way towards Mono Lake, but headed on a road that wasn't quite going in the right direction, so Evan got up on this rock thing to scope a route. He saw another road in the distance, just a short stint of bushwacking away.
The road we came from
This turned out to be a mistake as the ground started as deep sand, then degraded into silt. Gnarly silt. Much effort was expended. There were regrets.
Headed up a saddle in the mountains as the sun gets lower.
Golden hour in the desert.
As previously mentioned, it was pretty windy this day, so we headed to the lee side of the hills to find a camp. We set up at the base of this big, cool rock and it worked perfect. I could hear the wind whipping through the trees up in the hills, but it was pretty calm in our tents.
Caught a little alpineglow
Day 2:
Evan claimed he was up for sunrise, I didn't believe him until I saw the photographic evidence.
Neat rocks.
Our campsite was only a few miles from the highway. The original planned route for the start of Day 2 took us down to the highway, where we would ride pavement West for a few miles before picking up a dirt road that went back Easterly. Well, studying the map over breakfast we found a road the went across the highway straight South and picked up our Easterly road, but it looked like it dead ended at a canyon or wash or something. We were pretty confident we could get through and avoid the pavement. We got the end of the road, bushwacked through the sagebrush until we hit the canyon. Evan found a line into it that looked doable. He descended out of sight but I could tell a struggle was going on. I said I'm gonna ride around and find a better line. He responded with "I'm kind of committed to this one". I made my way into the canyon and back up the wash to find him totally stuck. Lol, committed indeed.
It took both of us to unwedge his front wheel and get the bike down that waist high boulder he's standing on. Nothing like expending maximum effort first thing in the morning.
Back on the intended road
That road led us to this cool canyon that came out in a big meadow in a valley.
The next destination was up to Sagehen Summit, where the fall colors were reportedly off the hook.
From there the next stop, and our Southern terminus, was Mammoth Lakes. We had lunch at Mammoth Brewing Company, refueled, and got water/food for camp that night.
Evan navigating, as always.
Evans filter skin after the silt on Day 1.
Headed North, we passed by Grant Lake
Headed up into the hills with Mono Lake in the background
We got to Virginia Lakes as the sun was getting low
Time to find another killer camping spot
This will do
I don't know if my snickers was calling me a hater, or if it's for haters or what? I just wanted desert.
Day 3:
Camp at first light, time to pack up and head out
We rode some super awesome single track on the way North towards Twin Lakes
Some more fun single track through the fall colors on the way North
This was the largest log crossing of the trip
That led to more scenery
Then we hit another super cool single track through a dense stand of Aspens
And back into the scenery
Wheelie time through the scenery
Right after wheelie time we encountered our first and only problem on the trip. I was riding behind Evan along some cow trail and it smelled weird, like a freshly struck match. Eventually Evan stopped and I pulled up alongside him and was just about to ask if he smelled it too. That's when I noticed smoke rising out of his navigation tower. I said "hey, I think your bike is on fire". He dismounted to investigate, and that's when we saw smoke absolutely pouring out from under the seat.
He whipped off his pack to get to his tools and while I tore the luggage off his bike out of the way of the seat. There was definitely a moment of panic as a bike fire not only would have left us stranded very far from help, but the entire meadow and surrounding hills could have gone up like a tinderbox in the wind.
Here's the charred battery, smoke was shooting out of that button in the middle like a geyser; it was in full on meltdown mode.
Here's the site of our emergency repairs. There was a stiff breeze, you can see how a fire could get out of control real quick.
Luckily Evan's Beta is an older carbureted true dirt bike, converted for dual sport (as opposed to a factory street legal dual sport, like my EXC), so it still runs without a battery and we were able to continue on.
A post mortem would later reveal that either his USB charger, or his regulator burnt up and started the whole thing off. Impossible to tell which happened first, but they were both cheap Chinese eBay components. His entire wiring scheme is custom.
Here's the last picture of the single track we continued on to.
We had planned to ride some more single track North of 108 on the way back to Walker, but Evan felt like he had used up all his luck for this trip. So instead we just buzzed back home on Burcham Flat Rd, a scenic wide graded dirt road, and made it back to the truck safely in the early afternoon.
All in all, really great trip. Looking forward to the next one.
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