Nevada - Where the feck has the trail gone??

So a little bit of frustration crept in today... the GPS track file had some weird kind of fault that meant it kept disappearing of the screen whilst we were on the move, then the trail became very vague right from the off & Geoff, who was leading, kept missing the turnings & getting more frustrated as the morning wore on...  the language was priceless!! :-).

Eventually we got on the trail properly & it led us through some great terrain, open desert at first then into some wadi's, (not sure what they called in the US but they are dry water canyons, sometime huge, sometimes tiny). There was very little shade so we just kept moving from setting out at 6.30am this morning & we still didn't get into Eureka until 7pm!!. This was especially a pain when I got a slow puncture in the front from hitting a rock, we eventually found a shady place & had the tube changed in 20 minutes...

Before we left, we got chatting to a young German lad who had cycled from New York to the Border Inn, then was heading eventually to San Francisco, pretty cool thing to do, but happier having an engine personally!!

So as the day wore on we covered well over 220 miles, with a break at Lund for some fuel for both the bikes & us, a great little cafe, but the lass who was cooking didn't seem that happy to see us at first, but she did warm up a bit towards the end of our visit...

We've passed through some fairly impressive scenery today, the trails feel like they have got a little more serious, they feel a little a bit more wild & much further away from civilisation, Nevada itself seems a bit more wild & with the skies threatening storms for a lot of the day, the light was fabulous through the stormy clouds, almost biblical with the long corpuscular rays shining light into specific places all around us... The smell of sage has also haunted us all day, no more so than when I took Kevin & Brian on a little detour directly through the brush to regain the trail after I had missed a turning... it was hilarious to see their faces, although my smile was soon wiped off my face when we hit a rocky descent that I took the wrong line on & ended up in a ditch fighting to keep the bike upright, this time it was me swearing a lot!!

We've passed through a couple of forestry bits today, the Humbolt & a piece I've forgotten the name of already...  shocking!! Plus we rode through a huge glacial valley called Cave Valley & heading through the Sawmill Canyon, all of which were strikingly different in their architecture & scenery. Sometimes we were on huge gravel roads & other times we were searching for the trail as a few bits clearly hadn't seen any traffic for awhile & the tyre tracks were almost grown over.

There were loads of birds of prey today, we disturbed two nesting short eared owls today, absolutely beautiful to see so close & the first time I've ever been that close to a bird like that in the wild... great stuff!

I like Nevada, I like the openness, the wildness & the rugged look to the place, it seems more untamed than anywhere else we've been on this trip, more like how it should be before mankind put its stamp on the face of the planet.

So for tonight we're in a town called Eureka, it looks like an old western town, with saloons & buildings that must date back to the early 1900's, this is a big mining area & you can see all of the mining relics here & there as well as the ongoing bits of today... a rich history I'm sure!!

Tomorrow we plan to have an easier day as we are all feeling a little tired & jaded, tempers are a little frayed around the edges & both of the XT's need new tyres & a bit more TLC... hey ho, we'll see what the terrain brings for us to play in tomorrow, but in the meantime, we're all just glad to find the trail open & unaffected by the stories of fires & floods so far...

Have fun all....