Cedar City to Baker:
August 26th and 27th Day 58 and 59
Happy 35th Anniversary to my parents on August 26th! Congrats!
After a killer downhill into Cedar City we had a nice stay at the same KOA campground from about 10 days earlier with Niki on our way to Jackson. Out ride from Cedar City, UT to Milford, UT was about 50 miles and we were only going that far because the next day would be 84 miles of no water, no services, no nothing. We arrived early afternoon in ghost town Milford and hung out at the city park to kill some time, nap, read. We ran into a guy throwing Frisbee with his dog that was part Mastiff, part black lab. Come to find out he is an engineer and builds “custom bio-diesel trikes.” He was spouting off some serious stats and info about bio-diesel and mechanics, sounded like a whole lot of bee, baa, boop, berp, to me and Brent. He builds the bikes and sells them on eBay and has sold 6 so far. All we could think was “how did he end up doing this kind of work in Milford, Utah?” Check out his site at www.mpgtrikes.com
It started to rain late in the afternoon and didn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon so we hopped in the one motel in Milford to get a good night’s rest for our 84 mile day of desolation. Milford is a railroad town and has two lines that intersect, so all the railroad workers stay the night at this motel during their 24 hours off before getting back on a train. Turned out to be a really wise decision as it rained the whole night, we had great wireless Internet signal and we got breakfast with the room. One thing I noticed hanging out in the hall as we were packing up to head out what a little scorpion right in the middle of the hallway. A first scorpion sighting for me and no I didn’t yelp like Brent when I stumbled upon him.
The 84 mile ride from Milford, UT to Baker, NV was great. It wasn’t too hot, we had plenty of cold water, unlike this dead cow apparently, and got a great sense of how our entire ride through Nevada would be. Basically in Nevada you go over a big mountain, down into a valley and you can see the next mountain you have to climb about 30 miles away. I learned that Nevada is the most mountainous state in the country and all the mountains ranges run parallel to each other, who knew, I always just though of Nevada as absurdly hot, flat desert. We stopped for lunch at a little house in the middle of the highway that appeared to be abandoned. We’d heard about the house from several bikers coming east and the three older English Gentleman had apparently stayed there for a night. The tree out front was good shelter for our trail mix and beef jerky lunch.
The whole day we saw maybe 40 cars and we eventually crossed the Nevada border and finally reached Pacific time. We crushed the rest of the day into Baker by around 3:30PM to snack, hydrate and get ready for dinner. The one café in Baker, population 54, was called Lectrolux, run by Terry Marasco. Terry is a photographer and artist and his café was great, we had pizza that night and then threw up our tents across the street behind the one gas pump in town. After our longest day without anything, our Morale was up and Nevada didn’t seem like it was going to be that bad, in fact quite the contrary.
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