Camp Reno

Cleaning the pool at Harrah’s one morning, looking north at a mountain with towers on it, and deciding to go up there on a bicycle and find out. Keystone Canyon, the dead mining camp at Poeville, radio towers humming in the wind at the summit, and Basque sheepherder carvings from the 1920s in an aspen grove on the back side. Ten miles of downhill to Mogul and home along the bypassed old highway. The first of the Paragon rides.

East instead of north, on a day the high country was not ready. The Truckee River trail to the end of it, over the freeway past a cat litter quarry, and up into the Pah Rah Range looking for petroglyphs I had read about. Found them — people, animals, squiggles, and some modern graffiti over the top. Then climbed above them to see more, put a hand on a ledge, and found out what the squiggles were pictures of.

Out the door at four in the morning to beat the heat and the afternoon thunderstorms, west to Verdi and over Dog Valley on the old Forest Service road — which turns out to be the actual 1846 Donner Trail, blazed a year earlier by Caleb Greenwood, later the Lincoln Highway, then forgotten. Truckee waking up at eight, a bookstore, an Edward Abbey. Donner Lake and a monument built twenty-two feet high because that is how deep the snow was. Then back over the same mountain at mile fifty-nine, because there was no other way home.

Cleaning the pool at Harrah’s at five in the morning, watching the sun light up Mt. Rose, and deciding to ride over it. Out at four the next morning, up the highest year-round pass in the Sierra Nevada, down to an empty beach at Lake Tahoe on a Thursday, into water cold enough to take your breath — and then back over the same 8,962-foot summit to get home. Seventy-four miles, 9,315 feet, fourteen hours. That night, two German beers and the first season of The Real World, wondering what kind of world they were in and what kind I was in.

Not every ride has to try to kill you. The one I actually did most — out the door before or after a shift at Harrah’s, west along the Truckee, up Hunter Creek to a USGS stream gauge I could not stop wondering about, then bombing down onto the Steamboat Ditch and running four miles of trail so flat it falls twelve feet, because Chinese laborers surveyed it that way in 1878. Twenty-one miles and back in time for work. The small one, and the one that turned out to matter.

I wanted a beer at the Bucket of Blood. Sixty-five miles later I had one — out through Hidden Valley on dirt, up into the Virginia Range on numbered BLM roads the size of a paperback, and down a beautiful wrong turn into a box canyon with the water nearly gone and a subdivision visible far below that I had no way of reaching. What got me out was ten gallons somebody had left under a juniper for a stranger. I drank it, filled up, left a note, and rode on to Virginia City and the Divide, then down nine miles of Geiger Grade with the whole Truckee Meadows coming up at me.