Well, these are the days that try men's souls took on new meaning for us. We'd planned to pickup west of McDermitt and get to the mountain foothills near the Zimmerman Ranch in one day. Saying we under estimated the terrain difficulty would give us some credit for a little intelligence, unfortunately, we lacked any intelligence on this, perhaps the most beautiful leg to date. We struggled. Headed east from the pickup late morning after dropping off the bikes west of the Zimmerman spread and driving back down the hill and out through the sage to intersect the state line where we'd left off. Got a late start as one of the bikes had a small mechanical problem we quietly fixed inside our McDermitt motel room. Anyway, the state milepoints were pretty much where they were supposed to be as we headed west across a plateau for the first couple of miles. We then dropped down into McDermitt Creek canyon and up the other side at an oblique which forced us to start crossing up and down through the side canyons until we bailed out by climbing far enough up the 6000 ft ridgeline to avoid going up and down the last couple of cross canyons. BEAUTIFUL creek and canyon, views of the mountains, etc. Pictures posted. We started down off the ridgeline to drop into the canyon with a nice 2 miles of walking across the Zimmerman valley ahead of us before the last couple up to the bikes. We ran out of daylight about the point we crossed the creek for the last time and hit the pastures/meadows. Walked on in the dark illuminated by a quarter moon for an hour and hit the Zimmermans place about 9PM with it about 20 degrees. We stopped and asked for a little water before trudging on to the bikes in the dark for another couple of miles and thank God they offered to run us up to our end point. Mr Zimmerman drove us up the valley through his son's (Arnie Zimmerman) ranch to our bikes and followed us back down the hill. Ever rode a motorcycle in 20 degree weather down hill on dirt roads??? Even at 20mph we had to stop 2-3 times in the ten miles to let the blood return to our hands and legs. Drove the bikes in the dark out through the sage and found the truck fairly straight away - surprise. We loaded up in the dark and made it back down to McDermitt about midnight. Thankfully the Casino is open 24 hours and even though the restaurant was closed the nice folks on duty made us some great roast beef sandwiches as we continued to thaw out. Our plan was to relocate that night to the Denio valley to the west and decided what the hell - we might as well head that way. Made it half way there to the Willow Cr Hot Spring (BLM) and pulled the bikes out so we could crawl in our bags and get some rest after soaking in the hot spring under the stars for a half hour or so. By then it was about 2 AM. We got up late, late morning, loaded back up, and met our other brother Dave in Denio Jct for lunch. Dave and his wife were headed down to Yuma for a spring break and had swung over east on the off chance they'd catch us. Worked out that way. You see you have cell service all over the valley east of Steens because there's a tower on top of that 10,000 foot mtn. We had just gotten out of the hot spring that morning and were getting reloaded when my cell phone rang and suprise - it's Dave and Linda. Anway, had a good lunch with the locals at Denio as we plotted our next day's debacle. Decided we still had enough daylight that we might as well pick off some valley floor desert miles before dark. We found a power pole just west of Denio to chain the bikes to and headed back east across the desert valley floor in the truck to a start point at the foothills. This time we hit it about right and trudged across the valley through tumble weeds, sage brush and prickly weeds just hitting Denio about dark. Had enough time to jump on the bikes, a little warmer that night but still approaching 35 degrees, and head back out to find the truck in the dark. Next days plan was to pick up some miles in the desert flats west of town.
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