Day 4 - Flowers and Misplaced Optimism

Flowers and Misplaced Optimism

The day began at 5:45 with an alarm sounding me to the bed of coals. It was oatmeal time again. We ate, packed up, and started out of camp by around 7:15. Up the canyon we found slight pools of water amongst the plentiful coarse red volcanic rock. Water was abundantly on and off for several miles. Although the canyon was an average narrow wash where we started, it kept surprising us with flat meadows, large openings, rock-walled narrows, and even a thick healthy patch of aspen. This was of note, Carson informed us, because they were the first aspen in our journey since the saddle of Mousier Canyon, overlooking Ely, on Leg I. They were a welcomed sight. The meadows we encountered were stuffed with blazing stars, which almost overcame the rocks as the most plentiful objects in sight. At one meadow in particular, we had to throw down and take a break because it was too stunning to stroll by. We took pictures, hoping to capture this beauty, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t get much of it. If you head on over there, sometime in May or June, you’ll find it. It escapes description. Among all of the places in Nevada I have been, which is a considerable amount, the meadow was the most “Nevada” of them all. That is - if you threw the whole state in a blender (cutting out, of course, the bruised and mushy parts like Vegas, Reno, and the Liberty Pit), the smoothie you would come out with would look, smell and taste like the Hot Creek Range. You might think I’m crazy, but trust me on this one.

The beauty of the canyon was balanced by its ruggedness. We were constantly presented with rock escarpments to scramble over. For the first time on the trip, I became ‘gassed’ before 10am. It was sad, but humbling. We took several breaks, and eventually scrambled to the top, over what had gradually become slopes of solid rock. We were greeted with a decently strong and cold breeze, and, of course, a good look at Table Mountain. We had made appreciable distance since our last vista, and now the snow lined ridge loomed only one valley away, Little Fish Lake valley. Sparing no time, we dropped into a canyon that would spit us out into the valley. The canyon was extremely steep and lacked most of the pleasant characteristics of the east side. We had to take off packs to pass them down a large cracked slab, which was an exciting breech of the standard, however it quickly became the norm. After less than a mile of steep rockiness, busting through p/j, aspen, mahogany, and rosehips, we popped out on to the bench. In about 45 minutes, we had descended the range that had taken us more than five hours to ascend from the other side. At the time, it was quite astonishing.

From the bench, we could see a large dirt road that we were to follow across the second half of the valley and a large hill/mesa about half way across, before the road. We decided on the hill for lunch, and continued our stroll. We broke up, all heading the same direction, and weaved through the old growth juniper and the warming breeze. Several regions of the woodland were nearly sand dunes of granitic grit. Several stringers of bitterbrush also made their way down from the tight thick canyons in the Hot Creeks to the southeast. We reached the hill, and walked up the side to discover that it was mostly cliffs on the other side. We had lunch on the edge, eating “our gloriously meager portions”, taking naps, and surveying the walk across to the big mountain.

We left the windy perch and found our way down through the cliffs and steep slopes to an interesting outcrop of hard white chalky rocks. To the south was a beaten and dusted draw that must have had water in it at one time, because there were about 50 horses hanging out. We caught their trail down to the real water in the valley bottom, and in the process spooked all of them, setting off a monumental dust cloud that marked their location even as they disappeared over several hills out of sight. At the valley bottom we found a muddy slurry of spring ruts. A decomposing rock and wooden one room house and the skeleton of somebody’s once trusty truck sat in the dirt on a hill close by. We crossed the flat and tied in with the well grated county road.

The road was a blessing and a curse. I gave Carson a shot at the sandals, and as he put them on, Paul and I took off down the road. It was a very straight road that had several yee-ha hills that could give you a bit of zero gravity if you were going upwards of 70 mph, but, alas, we were averaging about three miles every hour, so it was slightly less exciting. Paul and I swapped stories to pass the hammering walk, and after Carson caught up, Paul kept our minds off the trail with some interesting stories of his studies and parties in Vegas and his adventures in Israel and Sweden. We took a break under a juniper, only to find our feet slightly relieved at the cost of having to sit in the whipping wind, full of sand and poky vegetation. The break was ended and we plodded on, truly plodding for the first time. As we began to move up the alluvial fan of the other side, we came to an old ranch, the Clear Creek Ranch, which had been the subject of a conversation about a week before.

* * *

“There’s not really any place with people except for Hicks Station that we can head to in an emergency. Even if we get cell service, there’s only a few places we could call you in to easily” my brother said to my dad, both gathered around a few 1:100,000 maps spread on the table. Paul and I were examining a Nevada gazetteer.

“There’s no ranches over there? It’s been a while since I’ve been that way. You guys have gotta have some sort of a safety net figured out, you know, in case something bad happens…you’ll have a place to go. There’s got to be someone out there” my dad said, scratching his head, still hovering over the maps.

Paul and I spoted a dot on a page in the gazetteer, “This say’s there is a ‘Clear Creek Ranch’ right there in Little Fish Lake. I bet that’s still there, these gazetteers aren’t that old.”

“Yeah? I don’t know. Where?....Yeah……It’s not showing up as anything on the 1:100,000’s, although some of the other ranches are left out too” my brother said optimistically.

“Well, that’s at a good point in your trip to have something. You’ve got the Suzuki stashed at Big Lout, Hicks station in between, and then that ranch, maybe. From there…..” my dad was trying to piece together all of the details we’d thrown at him that evening.

My brother finishes for him. “From there, it’s a day on to Table, and two days down and across Monitor to Pine Creek. That’s a decent campground. There’ll be people there.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know about that ranch,” he said. “Let’s hope.”

* * *

We walked in the dropping angle of the sun past the buildings. Several were made of trimmed juniper logs piled with dirt, caving in to the six foot sagebrush bushes growing out of them. The corral fenced in several robust rabbitbrush, with a lone and dwarfed elm watching it all unfold. Some safety net. One shed had a deep rusted purple corrugated steel roof balancing on walls of milled boards, but everything else was made of the local wood and salt of the earth. It had to have been abandoned for more than sixty or seventy years. The sight of all of it was enough to make us chuclke at the follies of misplaced optimism in the planning process.

The creek could be heard as we got closer to the mouth of Clear Creek, and after I switched out into the sandals and Carson took pictures of the industrious ranch, we all dug deep for what little energy remained and we kept on keepin’, and eventually ran out of road, ran out of steam, and located the trailhead with a decent campsite right next to the clear and cold creek. There was even a pile of wood there, although it didn’t look like anyone had camped there in several years. There was an epitaph of one Robert V. League welded onto a sheet of metal, welded to a pole about knee height, decorated with a lone, faded, and empty whisky fifth.

Dinner was cous-cous-potato-mash, and the fire was great, even if it was mostly piñon. We worked on our own supply of whiskey, having not enough to make a difference but enough to make the point. The night came quick, and sleep accompanied it.

Our much anticipated ascent of Table Mountain stirred up a few butterflies and black holes in my stomach that afternoon and evening. We had been catching sights of it for the last few days, as if it were a yeti, peeking over every next hill, with a big dark and gristly grin, waiting to devour us. Now we were here, and with out first steps in the morning we would be walking into its jaws.