Natural Composite Material

I stayed with a Warm Showers host named Tod in Carson City, NV. This is Carson City as seen from his house.

Tod ride with me out of Carson City for 15 miles.

Soon after Tod turned around, the muddy road got much worse. It was so muddy I couldn't ride my bike, so I pushed the bike for a while. The sticky mud clogged my wheels so I couldn't push the bike anymore. It was as if the brakes were applied.

Mud and snow clogging the front wheel. Removing the fender didn't help.

Drivetrain covered in mud. 

The sun was setting. I thought maybe the mud would freeze and I could ride again. 

As the sun set, the muddy road quickly froze. Unfortunately, my drivetrain was now encased in frozen mud, and completely unusable. 

Jockey wheel frozen in place. 

Like reinforced concrete, the frozen mud contained an aggregate (dirt and gravel), plant matter to resist tensile forces, and an adhesive component (ice). I tried to chisel off the frozen mud with sticks, stones, and my cooking knife. This was hopeless. 

Eventually I poured boiling water on my drivetrain, which actually worked. I was able to get over the mountain pass that night. 

The next day, I encountered a hot spring on the side of the road, so I cleaned my drivetrain in the plentiful hot water.

Hot spring.

Hanging the drivetrain up to dry.

Some local people came out to say hello and gave me some cookies. They get hot water from the spring, and instead of a hot water tank, they actually need a cold water tank in their house. They said the water stays warm up to a mile downstream. 

Then next day I made it up and over Lucky Boy Pass, the highest point of this trip so far, at about 8000 ft (2400m). There wasn't much snow, but it was 17°F (-8°C) by 4:30pm, so I descended most of the way down the other side, towards Hawthorne, NV. 

In Hawthorne I visited the local historical museum. I was huge building packed full of natural and human-made artifacts. 

In the museum. Vending machine for scale.

Antique slot machine.

These two grandmothers operated the museum. They made me tea.

They told me that Hawthorne has a very good community support network. We talked about music therapy and bicycles and their town. I was wondering about the strange shaped roads surrounding Hawthorne, NV. They said that Hawthorne is surrounded by military-owned land, and ammunition is stored here. 

Odd road system surrounding Hawthorne.

The part of Nevada I'm in has a lot of abandoned mining infrastructure and ghost towns. I think many of the ghost towns economies we're centered around the mining industry. When the mining started to fade away, so did the town and everything in it. 

Here's a decommissioned gas pump in Mina, NV. Kind of cool to see inside. I think gas stations are usually some of the last businesses to go broke.

Abandoned mine.

Here the road was nowhere to be seen. I kept riding straight along the mud flat and found the road again on the other side. 

There was nasty weather in the forecast. I was just on the edge of the winter storm warning.

I set my tent up behind this old rusted tank for a little wind shelter.

Before the snow.

After the snow.

Luckily the storm passed in one day, so I rode a few miles in the afternoon.

I started seeing Joshua trees!

Goldfield, NV is another ghost town. There are a handful of people still living here. 

I talked with a resident in Goldfield. He said people stay in the abandoned houses sometimes, suggesting that I could do the same. I didn't want to trespass, and I asked where he would stay if he were me. Then he offered his old RV! He even brought me a heater. Very thankful for that!

Inside the RV.

In the summer he takes the RV on camping trips to go gold panning as a hobby (he can only make ~$10 per day). Jewelers will actually pay *more* than the market value for a nugget of gold. I guess because the distinctive shaped nugget can be set directly in jewelry without further processing. He has a panning claim on BLM land. This means that although anyone can camp on the BLM land, they're not allowed to pan for gold without his permission.

Cursed slide.

Ruins at Rhyolite, NV ghost town. 

The town was inhabited for less than a decade before the mining resources fizzled out and the inhabitants left.

These are burrows.

Burrow just means donkey in Spanish, but it's used to specifically refer to the wild donkey. Burrows and donkeys are the same species. I guess they've been wild for long enough that they look and act a little different, but I can't tell. 

Check out this cool mountain bike.

I met the guy who owned it in front of the Family Dollar in Beatty, NV. He stopped to check in on me and make sure I had the food, water, and bike parts that I needed. He was working on a sort of turbine/fan propulsion system for the bike, and I asked him about it:

"So, will this make you go faster?"

"Yeah"

"So is there a motor too, or is the fan pedal powered?"

"No, there's no motor, you just gotta get it going and then it will keep going and speed up. Not by much, maybe 1/4 mile per hour, per hour. Then it just keeps going, you just have to brake once in a while to slow it down."

"So is it a perpetual motion machine?"

"Yeah."

"I thought those were known for like, not working."

"People just don't want to get them going. Once you get it going, it just goes."

He wouldn't let me take a picture, because he didn't want folks from the petroleum industry to come knocking at his door. 

National park entrance.

Goodbye to Nevada for now. I think Nevada is one of my favorite states for bike touring so far. Endless dirt roads and tons of public land means you can ride in any direction, go any distance, and find a place to camp. There are hot springs, abandoned things, and wildlife. The distances are pretty long between services, and with that, much of the land seems relatively undisturbed by humans. The weather was cold and windy, but mostly dry. In the summer it might be too hot, so fall or spring would probably be a very good time to bike in Nevada. 

A grand welcome to California.

Map update.