FortyMileDesert
Adventurer
LR Trek 160 – 09 August 2009 – Black Warrior, the Craters and return via Fireball
Up at 6:15, breakfast at Pioneer Crossing, north through Wadsworth and Nixon. Finally hit the dirt at 8:00am. No need to air down as we didn’t pump them back up after yesterdays run……….
After a three mile run north and leaving the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, we turn east towards Black Warrior Peak which is about 10 miles away. The trail here is over sand with enough sage brush roots to keep from sinking in too much. Nearing the mountain I take what I called on the last Black Warrior trek “The Not Really a Trail Number One”. It’s up a wash that is sometimes sand, sometimes sand and brush and most of the way rocks, brush and sand.
Pretty soon we reach what a friend of mine calls the “Fifty Mile an Hour Trail”. He calls it that because his H2 Hummer gets away from him going down and he has never been able to climb back up it. The Disco and the Monte climb up with just a little bit of wheel spin. I locked my center diff and the electronic traction control never even came on. Probably the problem with H2s is that they are just way too heavy.
We drop down from the saddle at the top of the climb and then head closer too the peak of Black Warrior. There are no trails to the top of the mountain as it is a thousand foot high volcanic plug. There are a couple of narrow washes that do get very close to the cliffs. I take one that I didn’t try last time and eventually come to a rock wall and the need to turn around.
Ben attempts to turn around behind me but winds up stuck in the sand in the wash bottom. He’s got a right front wheel and a left rear wheel spinning on top the sand and the opposite two wheels doing nothing. This is the typical stuck for his truck as he has open differentials front and rear and does not have any sort of traction control to compensate for it.
I’m able to back away from the rock wall enough to enable me to have a bit of pulling distance and then we double up the recovery strap to shorten it. The Disco does its strange bit of hopping from wheel to wheel in the sand groping for traction and is able to extricate and straighten the Monte. As we only have the two of us; I get a picture of him at the end of the strap through my rear-view mirror.
After Ben backs down the wash about 50 feet, I turn the Disco around at the spot he got stuck just to prove the 4ETC……..We then head back west about two miles where we can catch the trail that will take us around the back side of the mountain.
Again we’re on a sandy trail through the sagebrush and then north into the box canyon with the basalt protruding out from the eastern cliffs. We stop at the mine at the end of the canyon with all of the old water heaters connected together with hoses. Another of those strange do-it-yourself low-budget prospectors sites where the prospectors went to crazy but inexpensive methods for extracting gold from ore.
Leaving the site I turn onto what I had last time called “The Trail That Is Not Really a Trail Number Two”. Basically it was previously just some very faint tire tracks along the wash. Since I was here last some (a lot of) motorcycles have run it and it’s now very easy to locate. The trail is alternately sandy and rocky. It’s really slow going for the three miles until it reaches the pole-line-road. I think the three miles took over an hour to traverse.
On the pole-line-road we head south about four miles and then catch the east-west pole-line and pipe-line trail that crosses over the Truckee Range and then down into North Valley. At the top we do some speculating as to how the gas company ever managed to dig the trench up the forty-five degree, mile and a half long slope that climbs close to 2000 vertical feet. It’s now noon; we decide that we will take our lunch break at the meteor craters.
An hour later at the craters we take a long lunch break and do some plinking with Ben’s .22 auto. We now have a couple of cans that look as if R. Lee Ermie used them on one of his “Lock and Load TV shows.
Later we run south up Tolbert Canyon and then cross Fireball Ridge at Nezelda. From Nezelda it was east and then south to Brady’s and then west onto Interstate 80 and back to Fernley for dinner at Chukars at about 4:30. Another fine day in the Nevada dserts.
Up at 6:15, breakfast at Pioneer Crossing, north through Wadsworth and Nixon. Finally hit the dirt at 8:00am. No need to air down as we didn’t pump them back up after yesterdays run……….
After a three mile run north and leaving the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, we turn east towards Black Warrior Peak which is about 10 miles away. The trail here is over sand with enough sage brush roots to keep from sinking in too much. Nearing the mountain I take what I called on the last Black Warrior trek “The Not Really a Trail Number One”. It’s up a wash that is sometimes sand, sometimes sand and brush and most of the way rocks, brush and sand.
Pretty soon we reach what a friend of mine calls the “Fifty Mile an Hour Trail”. He calls it that because his H2 Hummer gets away from him going down and he has never been able to climb back up it. The Disco and the Monte climb up with just a little bit of wheel spin. I locked my center diff and the electronic traction control never even came on. Probably the problem with H2s is that they are just way too heavy.
We drop down from the saddle at the top of the climb and then head closer too the peak of Black Warrior. There are no trails to the top of the mountain as it is a thousand foot high volcanic plug. There are a couple of narrow washes that do get very close to the cliffs. I take one that I didn’t try last time and eventually come to a rock wall and the need to turn around.
Ben attempts to turn around behind me but winds up stuck in the sand in the wash bottom. He’s got a right front wheel and a left rear wheel spinning on top the sand and the opposite two wheels doing nothing. This is the typical stuck for his truck as he has open differentials front and rear and does not have any sort of traction control to compensate for it.
I’m able to back away from the rock wall enough to enable me to have a bit of pulling distance and then we double up the recovery strap to shorten it. The Disco does its strange bit of hopping from wheel to wheel in the sand groping for traction and is able to extricate and straighten the Monte. As we only have the two of us; I get a picture of him at the end of the strap through my rear-view mirror.
After Ben backs down the wash about 50 feet, I turn the Disco around at the spot he got stuck just to prove the 4ETC……..We then head back west about two miles where we can catch the trail that will take us around the back side of the mountain.
Again we’re on a sandy trail through the sagebrush and then north into the box canyon with the basalt protruding out from the eastern cliffs. We stop at the mine at the end of the canyon with all of the old water heaters connected together with hoses. Another of those strange do-it-yourself low-budget prospectors sites where the prospectors went to crazy but inexpensive methods for extracting gold from ore.
Leaving the site I turn onto what I had last time called “The Trail That Is Not Really a Trail Number Two”. Basically it was previously just some very faint tire tracks along the wash. Since I was here last some (a lot of) motorcycles have run it and it’s now very easy to locate. The trail is alternately sandy and rocky. It’s really slow going for the three miles until it reaches the pole-line-road. I think the three miles took over an hour to traverse.
On the pole-line-road we head south about four miles and then catch the east-west pole-line and pipe-line trail that crosses over the Truckee Range and then down into North Valley. At the top we do some speculating as to how the gas company ever managed to dig the trench up the forty-five degree, mile and a half long slope that climbs close to 2000 vertical feet. It’s now noon; we decide that we will take our lunch break at the meteor craters.
An hour later at the craters we take a long lunch break and do some plinking with Ben’s .22 auto. We now have a couple of cans that look as if R. Lee Ermie used them on one of his “Lock and Load TV shows.
Later we run south up Tolbert Canyon and then cross Fireball Ridge at Nezelda. From Nezelda it was east and then south to Brady’s and then west onto Interstate 80 and back to Fernley for dinner at Chukars at about 4:30. Another fine day in the Nevada dserts.