Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn (I thought vacations were supposed to be relaxing?!), we packed up, and hit the road for Lakeview. We stopped for breakfast in Susanville, and discovered a grand cafŽ (the ‘Grand CafŽ’) that served an excellent buckwheat stack. Not only that, but it was right next to a bookstore (Kat stocked up, having discovered that Hang Driving supplies a lot of reading time), and around the corner from a bike shop, replete with Nipples. Or, Bite Valves, as they insisted on calling them (‘uh, Bite Me’ as Beavis would say).
The trip up 395 was uneventful, and allowed us to catch up on our
Z’s by turns. We got stuck in some repaving, just south of Lakeview. This would prove
to be a common factor later, as we discovered that it was all between Lakeview and the
Sugar Hill launch. On the first day, we arrived too late to track down other pilots, and
the Meet HQ (to be the Elk Lodge) was not active yet. So we stopped at the Chamber of
Commerce (friendly folks) bought a $5 Site Guide, and studied our options.
Lakeview sits at 4,800 MSL on the western side of the Warner range, a north/south ridge over 100 miles long, with most peaks between 7,000 and 8,000. The launches almost all face west, or southwest. We weren’t sure what the local conditions called for, but Rick had scoped out the Doherty Slide ridge on a previous work trip. The west-facing Slide was mentioned in an article in the HG Mag a few years ago, as being the Glass-off From Hell (as in, can’t get down even after the sun goes down, and no source of lights otherwise). It’s about 60 miles east of Lakeview on 140, on the way to Winnemucca—and not much else. Once over the mountains, we discovered how desolate this country really is. Once past the crossroads of Adel (pronounced ‘Uh-Dell’ we learned later, not ‘Ay-dle’), there is nothing but geese, coots, ducks, and herons, paddling around in the winter runoff lakes in the flat valley. Another ridge later (‘Greaser ridge’), and it opens back on dry scrubby flats, all the way to Doherty.
Highway 140 cuts a diagonal slash up the face of the dark brown igneous
face of the Slide, visible for 20 miles. We climbed up, the road curvy in the horizontal
plane, straight in its grade, almost 1700 feet. The launch was marked with an official
Park Service sign, a gravel roll-off ramp that looked completely no-brainer, though it was
30¡ cross, and honkin’. Early burnout struck, and none of us felt like trying it. It
would’ve taken all but one of us to launch one—meaning that only one
could’ve flown. Of course, we learned later that those conditions were
typical/perfect, and we blew it.
On the way back, the one of the birds demonstrated how little traffic there is by flying right in front of us and breaking its neck on our rack straps. We cruised the camping possibilities in the mountains—beautiful, but remote. We saw deer, beavers, and trees so big that it took three tree-huggers to span around.
Text and photos © 1997, Phammer