By then the sun was down and time to head back to camp.
Dave and I cooked some marinated chicken Rina had prepared with mushrooms, garlic, onions, and for Dave, peppers. After dinner, Dave, Grant, and I headed up to the hotel to take a dip in the pool and have a nice shower. We took advantage of the showers every night we were there. By the time we got back we had time for a little chatting around the fire and then it was time to hit the sack.
Wednesday - March 4, 2015
I'm not sure why, but the Seattle guys decided we still needed to ride as a group. I thought they'd want to do more challenging stuff, but whatever. It's all good riding as a group too.
Today we went to Darwin, which is an old mining town that still has some people living there. However, we didn't take the direct route. First we rode the 30.6 miles to Panamint Springs, then just past that, there's a turn off for the Darwin Canyon road. It's not quite 13 miles to Darwin going this way. The road wasn't too bad, except for the rocks. There was one particular spot that was pretty nasty, but I just barreled on up it with my skid plate taking the abuse and the bike bucking around like a bronco in a rodeo. I was pretty determined not to fall again. Besides, falling in that particular spot would have been bad for the bike and me both.
Just up from that spot were old mines and foundations from old buildings. You can see in the pictures here that it's pretty steep, but they must have hauled a bunch of materials up to erect the buildings they had. Making our way down the other side of the hill, we came to a "Y" in the road. Going to the right would take us to Darwin Falls which sounded good, but Rob mentioned that the road can be sketchy. So we skipped that. But the road we had to take ended up in loose sand. Now, I've read how to do sand and this was my chance to put it into practice. You know what? They're right.
The way to deal with sand is to keep your speed up. When you slow down your front tire has more time, so to speak, to get caught and wash the bike out. For a while I was doing fine. But when Grant and Mike Largent slowed down I had to too and that had me dumping the bike again, which ticked me off a bit. I got past them so I could keep my speed up. Rob just missed getting a video of me dumping the bike. Had he gotten that, I would have placed it here for all to see.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
